In the late-1950s, leasing time on an IBM 704 cost hundreds of dollars per minute. Today, cloud computing, that is, using IT as a service, on-demand and pay-per-use, is a widely used computing paradigm that offers large economies of scale. Born from a need to make platform as a service (PaaS) more accessible, fine-grained, and affordable, serverless computing has garnered interest from both industry and academia. This article aims to give an understanding of these early days of serverless computing: what it is, where it comes from, what is the current status of serverless technology, and what are its main obstacles and opportunities.

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In the new Digital Economy, massive computer systems, often grouped in datacenters, serve as factories "producing" cloud services with massive consumption. However, to afford cloud services globally, we must address new research challenges in designing, operating, and using modern datacenters. We must also address challenges in educating and training the next generation of datacenter engineers. Addressing such challenges, in this work we present our vision on OpenDC: we envision the exploration of various datacenter concepts and technologies, using existing and new scientific methods, enabling new education practices and topics, and leading to the creation of new software and data artifacts. We present the datacenter concepts and technologies we are currently planning to explore using OpenDC. We identify the scientific methods we want to use, and explain our vision of education practices. We present the architecture and open-source program underlying the OpenDC software, and the format and open-access data we use for datacenter experiments. We conclude with an open invitation for the community to join our effort.@en