Cloud object storage such as AWS S3 is cost-effective and highly elastic but relatively slow, while high-performance cloud storage such as AWS ElastiCache is expensive and provides limited elasticity. We present a new cloud storage service called ServerlessMemory, which stores data using the memory of serverless functions. ServerlessMemory employs a sliding-window-based memory management strategy inspired by the garbage collection mechanisms used in the programming language to effectively segregate hot/cold data and provides fine-grained elasticity, good performance, and a pay-per-access cost model with extremely low cost. We then design and implement InfiniStore, a persistent and elastic cloud storage system, which seamlessly couples the function-based ServerlessMemory layer with a persistent, inexpensive cloud object store layer. InfiniStore enables durability despite function failures using a fast parallel recovery scheme built on the auto-scaling functionality of a FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) platform. We evaluate InfiniStore extensively using both microbenchmarking and two real-world applications. Results show that InfiniStore has more performance benefits for objects larger than 10 MB compared to AWS ElastiCache and Anna, and InfiniStore achieves 26.25% and 97.24% tenant-side cost reduction compared to InfiniCache and ElastiCache, respectively.
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InfiniCache: Exploiting Ephemeral Serverless Functions to Build a Cost-Effective Memory Cache
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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1919075
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10167834
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
