Serverless computing has gained attention due to its fine-grained provisioning, large-scale multi-tenancy, and on-demand scaling. However, it also forces applications to externalize state in remote storage, adding substantial overheads. To fix this "data shipping problem" we built Shredder, a low-latency multi-tenant cloud store that allows small units of computation to be performed directly within storage nodes. Storage tenants provide Shredder with JavaScript functions (or WebAssembly programs), which can interact directly with data without moving them over the network.
The key challenge in Shredder is safely isolating thousands of tenant storage functions while minimizing data interaction costs. Shredder uses a unique approach where its data store and networking paths are implemented in native code to ensure performance, while isolated tenant functions interact with data using a V8-specific intermediate representation that avoids expensive cross-protection-domain calls and data copying. As a result, Shredder can execute 4 million remotely-invoked tenant functions per second spread over thousands of tenants with median and 99th-percentile response latencies of less than 50 μs and 500 μs, respectively. Our evaluation shows that Shredder achieves a 14% to 78% speedup against conventional remote storage when fetching items with just one to three data dependencies between them. We also demonstrate Shredder's effectiveness in accelerating data-intensive applications, including a k-hop query on social graphs that shows orders of magnitude gain.
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On the Impact of Isolation Costs on Locality-aware Cloud Scheduling
Serverless applications create an opportunity for more granular scheduling across machines in cloud platforms that can improve efficiency, especially if functions can be run within storage services to eliminate data movement. However, embedding code within storage services creates code isolation overheads that offset some of those savings. We argue for a new approach to serverless function scheduling that can look within serverless applications' functions, profile their data movement and networking costs, and model the impact of different code placement and isolation schemes for those costs. Beyond improvements in efficiency, such an approach would fuel innovation in cloud isolation schemes and programming abstractions, since a scheduler with a modular cost modeling approach could incorporate new schemes and automatically use them to improve efficiency for pre-existing applications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1750558
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10224442
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 12th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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