Edge cloud solutions that bring the cloud closer to the sensors can be very useful to meet the low latency requirements of many Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. However, IoT traffic can also be intermittent, so running applications constantly can be wasteful. Therefore, having a serverless edge cloud that is responsive and provides low-latency features is a very attractive option for a resource and cost-efficient IoT application environment.In this paper, we discuss the key components needed to support IoT traffic in the serverless edge cloud and identify the critical challenges that make it difficult to directly use existing serverless solutions such as Knative, for IoT applications. These include overhead from heavyweight components for managing the overall system and software adaptors for communication protocol translation used in off-the-shelf serverless platforms that are designed for large-scale centralized clouds. The latency imposed by ‘cold start’ is a further deterrent.To address these challenges we redesign several components of the Knative serverless framework. We use a streamlined protocol adaptor to leverage the MQTT IoT protocol in our serverless framework for IoT event processing. We also create a novel, event-driven proxy based on the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), to replace the regular heavyweight Knative queue proxy. Our preliminary experimental results show that the event-driven proxy is a suitable replacement for the queue proxy in an IoT serverless environment and results in lower CPU usage and a higher request throughput.
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Motivating High Performance Serverless Workloads
The historical motivation for serverless comes from internet-of-things, smartphone client server, and the objective of simplifying programming (no provisioning) and scale-down (pay-for-use). These applications are generally low-performance best-effort. However, the serverless model enables flexible software architectures suitable for a wide range of applications that demand high-performance and guaranteed performance. We have studied three such applications - scientific data streaming, virtual/augmented reality, and document annotation. We describe how each can be cast in a serverless software architecture and how the application performance requirements translate into high performance requirements (invocation rate, low and predictable latency) for the underlying serverless system implementation. These applications can require invocations rates as high as millions per second (40 MHz) and latency deadlines below a microsecond (300 ns),
and furthermore require performance predictability. All of these capabilities are far in excess of today's commercial serverless offerings and represent interesting research challenges.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1901466
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10253547
- Editor(s):
- Foster, Ian; Chard, Kyle; Babuji, Yadu
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- THE 1ST WORKSHOP ON HIGH PERFORMANCE SERVERLESS COMPUTING
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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