Serverless computing platforms have gained popularity because they allow easy deployment of services in a highly scalable and cost-effective manner. By enabling just-in-time startup of container-based services, these platforms can achieve good multiplexing and automatically respond to traffic growth, making them particularly desirable for edge cloud data centers where resources are scarce. Edge cloud data centers are also gaining attention because of their promise to provide responsive, low-latency shared computing and storage resources. Bringing serverless capabilities to edge cloud data centers must continue to achieve the goals of low latency and reliability. The reliability guarantees provided by serverless computing however are weak, with node failures causing requests to be dropped or executed multiple times. Thus serverless computing only provides a best effort infrastructure, leaving application developers responsible for implementing stronger reliability guarantees at a higher level. Current approaches for providing stronger semantics such as “exactly once” guarantees could be integrated into serverless platforms, but they come at high cost in terms of both latency and resource consumption. As edge cloud services move towards applications such as autonomous vehicle control that require strong guarantees for both reliability and performance, these approaches may no longer be sufficient. In this paper we evaluate the latency, throughput, and resource costs of providing different reliability guarantees, with a focus on these emerging edge cloud platforms and applications.
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Fine-Grained Isolation for Scalable, Dynamic, Multi-tenant Edge Clouds
5G edge clouds promise a pervasive computational infrastructure a short network hop away, enabling a new breed of smart devices that respond in real-time to their physical surroundings. Unfortunately, today’s operating system designs fail to meet the goals of scalable isolation, dense multi-tenancy, and high performance needed for such applications. In this paper we introduce EdgeOS that emphasizes system-wide isolation as fine-grained as per-client. We propose a novel memory movement accelerator architecture that employs data copying to enforce strong isolation without performance penalties. To support scalable isolation, we introduce a new protection domain implementation that offers lightweight isolation, fast startup and low latency even under high churn. We implement EdgeOS in a microkernel based OS and demonstrate running high scale network middleboxes using the Click software router and endpoint applications such as memcached, a TLS proxy, and neural network inference. We reduce startup latency by 170X compared to Linux processes, and improve latency by three orders of magnitude when running 300 to 1000 edge-cloud memcached instances on one server.
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- PAR ID:
- 10187005
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Usenix Annual Technical Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Serverless computing platforms have gained popularity because they allow easy deployment of services in a highly scalable and cost-effective manner. By enabling just-in-time startup of container-based services, these platforms can achieve good multiplexing and automatically respond to traffic growth, making them particularly desirable for edge cloud data centers where resources are scarce. Edge cloud data centers are also gaining attention because of their promise to provide responsive, low-latency shared computing and storage resources. Bringing serverless capabilities to edge cloud data centers must continue to achieve the goals of low latency and reliability. The reliability guarantees provided by serverless computing however are weak, with node failures causing requests to be dropped or executed multiple times. Thus serverless computing only provides a best effort infrastructure, leaving application developers responsible for implementing stronger reliability guarantees at a higher level. Current approaches for providing stronger semantics such as ``exactly once'' guarantees could be integrated into serverless platforms, but they come at high cost in terms of both latency and resource consumption. As edge cloud services move towards applications such as autonomous vehicle control that require strong guarantees for both reliability and performance, these approaches may no longer be sufficient. In this paper we evaluate the latency, throughput, and resource costs of providing different reliability guarantees, with a focus on these emerging edge cloud platforms and applications.more » « less
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