Service Continuity for Serverless-Edge Consumer Applications: Opportunities and Issues

Service continuity is a critical requirement for serverless systems deployed across the cloud-edge continuum, where dynamic conditions such as user mobility, network disruptions, and resource constraints are common. Serverless computing promises scalability, transparency, and efficiency, but ensuring seamless function execution across distributed and heterogeneous environments remains challenging. This article explores the functional and operational dimensions of service continuity in serverless edge computing systems. We identify core consumer scenarios and analyze challenges related to invocation routing, secure communication, and session-state management. We present recent advances and candidate solutions, including application-layer redirection, transport-layer connection migration, post-quantum cryptography, and hybrid state management. Our findings highlight the need for platform-level support and coordination between computing and networking components to achieve transparent, efficient, and secure service continuity at the serverless-operated edge. Ultimately, service-continuity mechanisms are key enablers of future consumer technologies, where always-on, latency-critical experiences depend on resilient and seamless function execution.