Serverless computing is an emerging paradigm in which an application's resource provisioning and scaling are managed by third-party services. Examples include AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions. Behind these services' easy-to-use APIs are opaque, complex infrastructure and management ecosystems. Taking on the viewpoint of a serverless customer, we conduct the largest measurement study to date, launching more than 50,000 function instances across these three services, in order to characterize their architectures, performance, and resource management efficiency. We explain how the platforms isolate the functions of different accounts, using either virtual machines or containers, which has important security implications. We characterize performance in terms of scalability, coldstart latency, and resource efficiency, with highlights including that AWS Lambda adopts a bin-packing-like strategy to maximize VM memory utilization, that severe contention between functions can arise in AWS and Azure, and that Google had bugs that allow customers to use resources for free.
more »
« less
Tracking Causal Order in AWS Lambda Applications
Serverless computing is a new cloud programming and deployment paradigm that is receiving wide-spread uptake. Serverless offerings such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, Google Functions, and Azure Functions automatically execute simple functions uploaded by developers, in response to cloud-based event triggers. The serverless abstraction greatly simplifies integration of concurrency and parallelism into cloud applications, and enables deployment of scalable distributed systems and services at very low cost. Although a significant first step, the serverless abstraction requires tools that software engineers can use to reason about, debug, and optimize their increasingly complex, asynchronous applications. Toward this end, we investigate the design and implementation of GammaRay, a cloud service that extracts causal dependencies across functions and through cloud services, without programmer intervention. We implement GammaRay for AWS Lambda and evaluate the overheads that it introduces for serverless micro-benchmarks and applications written in Python.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1703560
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10091224
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 50 to 60
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Serverless computing is a promising new event- driven programming model that was designed by cloud vendors to expedite the development and deployment of scalable web services on cloud computing systems. Using the model, developers write applications that consist of simple, independent, stateless functions that the cloud invokes on-demand (i.e. elastically), in response to system-wide events (data arrival, messages, web requests, etc.). In this work, we present STOIC (Serverless TeleOperable HybrId Cloud), an application scheduling and deployment system that extends the serverless model in two ways. First, it uses the model in a distributed setting and schedules application functions across multiple cloud systems. Second, STOIC sup- ports serverless function execution using hardware acceleration (e.g. GPU resources) when available from the underlying cloud system. We overview the design and implementation of STOIC and empirically evaluate it using real-world machine learning applications and multi-tier (e.g. edge-cloud) deployments. We find that STOIC’s combined use of edge and cloud resources is able to outperform using either cloud in isolation for the applications and datasets that we consider.more » « less
-
Developers are always on the lookout for simple solutions to manage their applications on cloud platforms. Major cloud providers have already been offering automatic elasticity management solutions (e.g., AWS Lambda, Azure durable function) to users. However, many cloud applications are stateful --- while executing, functions need to share their state with others. Providing elasticity for such stateful functions is much more challenging, as a deployment/elasticity decision for a stateful entity can strongly affect others in ways which are hard to predict without any application knowledge. Existing solutions either only support stateless applications (e.g., AWS Lambda) or only provide limited elasticity management (e.g., Azure durable function) to stateful applications. PLASMA (Programmable Elasticity for Stateful Cloud Computing Applications) is a programming framework for elastic stateful cloud applications. It includes (1) an elasticity programming language as a second "level" of programming (complementing the main application programming language) for describing elasticity behavior, and (2) a novel semantics-aware elasticity management runtime that tracks program execution and acts upon application features as suggested by elasticity behavior. We have implemented 10+ applications with PLASMA. Extensive evaluation on Amazon AWS shows that PLASMA significantly improves their efficiency, e.g., achieving same performance as a vanilla setup with 25% fewer resources, or improving performance by 40% compared to the default setup.more » « less
-
Serverless computing has become increasingly popular for cloud applications, due to its compelling properties of high-level abstractions, lightweight runtime, high elasticity and pay-per-use billing. In this revolutionary computing paradigm shift, challenges arise when adapting data analytics applications to the serverless environment, due to the lack of support for efficient state sharing, which attract ever-growing research attention. In this paper, we aim to exploit the advantages of task level orchestration and fine-grained resource provisioning for data analytics on serverless platforms, with the hope of fulfilling the promise of serverless deployment to the maximum extent. To this end, we present ACTS, an autonomous cost-efficient task orchestration framework for serverless analytics. ACTS judiciously schedules and coordinates function tasks to mitigate cold-start latency and state sharing overhead. In addition, ACTS explores the optimization space of fine-grained workload distribution and function resource configuration for cost efficiency. We have deployed and implemented ACTS on AWS Lambda, evaluated with various data analytics workloads. Results from extensive experiments demonstrate that ACTS achieves up to 98% monetary cost reduction while maintaining superior job completion time performance, in comparison with the state-of-the-art baselines.more » « less
-
Internet-scale web applications are becoming increasingly storage-intensive and rely heavily on in-memory object caching to attain required I/O performance. We argue that the emerging serverless computing paradigm provides a well-suited, cost-effective platform for object caching. We present InfiniCache, a first-of-its-kind in-memory object caching system that is completely built and deployed atop ephemeral serverless functions. InfiniCache exploits and orchestrates serverless functions' memory resources to enable elastic pay-per-use caching. InfiniCache's design combines erasure coding, intelligent billed duration control, and an efficient data backup mechanism to maximize data availability and cost-effectiveness while balancing the risk of losing cached state and performance. We implement InfiniCache on AWS Lambda and show that it: (1) achieves 31 – 96× tenant-side cost savings compared to AWS ElastiCache for a large-object-only production workload, (2) can effectively provide 95.4% data availability for each one hour window, and (3) enables comparative performance seen in a typical in-memory cache.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/IC2E.2018.00027
