  The serverless computing paradigm promises many desirable properties for
cloud applications - low-cost, fine-grained deployment, and management-free
operation. Consequently, the paradigm has underwent rapid growth: there
currently exist tens of serverless platforms and all global cloud providers
host serverless operations. To help tune existing platforms, guide the design
of new serverless approaches, and overall contribute to understanding this
paradigm, in this work we present a long-term, comprehensive effort to
identify, collect, and characterize 89 serverless use cases. We survey use
cases, sourced from white and grey literature, and from consultations with
experts in areas such as scientific computing. We study each use case using 24
characteristics, including general aspects, but also workload, application, and
requirements. When the use cases employ workflows, we further analyze their
characteristics. Overall, we hope our study will be useful for both academia
and industry, and encourage the community to further share and communicate
their use cases.
  This article appears also as a SPEC Technical Report:
https://research.spec.org/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/rg_cloud/endorsed_publications/SPEC_RG_2020_Serverless_Usecases.pdf
  The article may be submitted for peer-reviewed publication.
