Serverless: beyond the cloud

Serverless computing is widely known as an event-driven cloud execution model. In this model, the client provides the code and the cloud provider manages the life-cycle of the execution environment of that code. The idea is based on reducing the life span of the program to execute functionality in response to an event. Hence, the program's processes are born when an event is triggered and are killed after the event is processed. This model has proved its usefulness in the cloud as it reduced the operational cost and complexity of executing event-driven workloads. In this paper we argue that the serverless model does not have to be limited the to the cloud. We show how the same model can be applied at the micro-level of a single machine. In such model, certain operating system commands are treated as events that trigger a serverless reaction. This reaction consists of deploying and running code only in response to those events. Thus, reducing the attack surface and complexity of managing single machines.