The advent of serverless computing has revolutionized the landscape of cloud computing, offering a new paradigm that enables developers to focus solely on their applications rather than managing and provisioning the underlying infrastructure. These applications involve integrating individual functions into a cohesive workflow for complex tasks. The pay-per-use model and nontransparent reporting by cloud providers make it difficult to estimate serverless costs, imped-ing informed business decisions. Existing research studies on serverless compu-ting focus on performance optimization and state management, both from empir-ical and technical perspectives. However, the state-of-the-art shows a lack of em-pirical investigations on the understanding of the cost dynamics of serverless computing over traditional cloud computing. Therefore, this study delves into how organizations anticipate the costs of adopting serverless. It also aims to com-prehend workload suitability and identify best practices for cost optimization of serverless applications. To this end, we conducted a qualitative (interviews) study with 15 experts from 8 companies involved in the migration and development of serverless systems. The findings revealed that, while serverless computing is highly suitable for unpredictable workloads, it may not be cost-effective for cer-tain high-scale applications. The study also introduces a taxonomy for comparing the cost of adopting serverless versus traditional cloud.

翻译：无服务器计算的出现彻底改变了云计算格局，提供了一种新范式，使开发者能够专注于应用程序本身，而无需管理和配置底层基础设施。这些应用程序涉及将单个函数集成到连贯的工作流中，以完成复杂任务。按使用量付费的模式以及云提供商不透明的报告方式，使得估算无服务器成本变得困难，从而阻碍了明智的业务决策。现有关于无服务器计算的研究主要集中在性能优化和状态管理方面，既有实证研究也有技术视角。然而，现有技术现状表明，缺乏对无服务器计算相对于传统云计算成本动态理解的实证调查。因此，本研究深入探讨了组织如何预期采用无服务器的成本。同时，旨在理解工作负载的适用性，并识别无服务器应用成本优化的最佳实践。为此，我们与来自8家参与无服务器系统迁移与开发公司的15位专家进行了定性（访谈）研究。研究结果表明，尽管无服务器计算高度适用于不可预测的工作负载，但对于某些大规模应用而言，可能并不具有成本效益。本研究还引入了一个分类体系，用于比较采用无服务器与传统云计算的成本。