A Blueprint for Building Serverless Applications on the Net

Abstract

A peer-to-peer application architecture is proposed that has the potential to eliminate the back-end servers for hosting services on the Internet. The proposed application architecture has been modeled as a distributed system for delivering an Internet service. The service thus created, though chaotic and fraught with uncertainties, would be highly scalable and capable of achieving unprecedented levels of robustness and viability with the increase in the number of the users. The core issues relating to the architecture, such as service discovery, distributed application architecture components, and inter-application communications, have been analysed. It is shown that the communications for the coordination of various functions, among the cooperating instances of the application, may be optimised using a divide-and-conquer strategy. Finally, the areas where future work needs to be directed have been identified.