Serverless is an emerging cloud computing paradigm that facilitates developers to focus solely on the application logic rather than provisioning and managing the underlying infrastructure. The inherent characteristics such as scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency of serverless computing, attracted many companies to migrate their legacy applications toward this paradigm. However, the stateless nature of serverless requires careful migration planning, consideration of its subsequent implications, and potential challenges. To this end, this study investigates the intentions, strategies, and technical and organizational challenges while migrating to a serverless architecture. We investigated the migration processes of 11 systems across diverse domains by conducting 15 in-depth interviews with professionals from 11 organizations. we also presented a detailed discussion of each migration case. Our findings reveal that large enterprises primarily migrate to enhance scalability and operational efficiency, while smaller organizations intend to reduce the cost. Furthermore, organizations use a domain-driven design approach to identify the use case and gradually migrate to serverless using a strangler pattern. However, migration encounters technical challenges i.e., testing event-driven architecture, integrating with the legacy system, lack of standardization, and organizational challenges i.e., mindset change and hiring skilled serverless developers as a prominent. The findings of this study provide a comprehensive understanding that can guide future implementations and advancements in the context of serverless migration.

翻译：无服务器是一种新兴的云计算范式，它使开发者能够专注于应用逻辑，而无需配置和管理底层基础设施。无服务器计算固有的可扩展性、灵活性和成本效益等特性，吸引了众多企业将其遗留应用迁移至这一范式。然而，无服务器的无状态特性要求细致的迁移规划，需考虑其后续影响及潜在挑战。为此，本研究调研了迁移至无服务器架构过程中的意图、策略以及技术与组织层面的挑战。我们通过对来自11个组织的专业人士进行15次深度访谈，研究了跨不同领域的11个系统的迁移过程，并对每个迁移案例进行了详细讨论。研究结果表明，大型企业迁移的主要目的是增强可扩展性和运营效率，而小型组织则意在降低成本。此外，组织采用领域驱动设计方法识别用例，并运用“扼杀者模式”逐步迁移至无服务器。然而，迁移过程中面临技术挑战（如事件驱动架构的测试、与遗留系统的集成、缺乏标准化）以及组织挑战（如思维模式转变和招聘熟练的无服务器开发者）。本研究的发现为无服务器迁移提供了全面理解，可指导未来的实施与相关技术的进步。