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Along with the rise of domain‐specific computing (ASICs hardware) and domain‐specific programming languages, we envision that the next step is the emergence of domain‐specific cloud platforms. Considering multimedia streaming as one of the most trendy applications in the IT industry, the goal of this study is to develop serverless multimedia streaming engine (SMSE), the first domain‐specific serverless platform for multimedia streaming. SMSE democratizes multimedia service development via enabling content providers (or even end‐users) to rapidly develop their desired functionalities on their multimedia contents. Upon developing SMSE, the next goal of this study is to deal with its efficiency challenges and develop a function container provisioning method that can efficiently utilize cloud resources and improve the users' quality of service. In particular, we develop a dynamic method that provisions durable or ephemeral containers depending on the spatiotemporal and data‐dependency characteristics of the functions. Evaluating the prototype implementation of SMSE under real‐world settings demonstrates its capability to reduce both the containerization overhead, and the makespan time of serving multimedia processing functions (by up to 30%) in compare to the function provision methods that are being used in the general‐purpose serverless cloud systems. 

Summary Serverless computing along with Function‐as‐a‐Service (FaaS) is forming a new computing paradigm that is anticipated to found the next generation of cloud systems. The popularity of this paradigm is due to offering a highly transparent infrastructure that enables user applications to scale in the granularity of their functions. Since these often small and single‐purpose functions are managed on shared computing resources behind the scene, a great potential for computational reuse and approximate computing emerges that if unleashed, can remarkably improve the efficiency of serverless cloud systems—both from the user's QoS and system's (energy consumption and incurred cost) perspectives. Accordingly, the goal of this survey study is to, first, unfold the internal mechanics of serverless computing and, second, explore the scope for efficiency within this paradigm via studying function reuse and approximation approaches and discussing the pros and cons of each one. Next, we outline potential future research directions within this paradigm that can either unlock new use cases or make the paradigm more efficient.