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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PLASMA: programmable elasticity for stateful cloud computing applications
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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1909877
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10195655
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- EuroSys ’20
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3342195.3387553
