Serverless computing promises an efficient, low-cost compute capability in cloud environments. However, existing solutions, epitomized by open-source platforms such as Knative, include heavyweight components that undermine this goal of serverless computing. Additionally, such serverless platforms lack dataplane optimizations to achieve efficient, high-performance function chains that facilitate the popular microservices development paradigm. Their use of unnecessarily complex and duplicate capabilities for building function chains severely degrades performance. 'Cold-start' latency is another deterrent.
We describe SPRIGHT, a lightweight, high-performance, responsive serverless framework. SPRIGHT exploits shared memory processing and dramatically improves the scalability of the dataplane by avoiding unnecessary protocol processing and serialization-deserialization overheads. SPRIGHT extensively leverages event-driven processing with the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF). We creatively use eBPF's socket message mechanism to support shared memory processing, with overheads being strictly load-proportional. Compared to constantly-running, polling-based DPDK, SPRIGHT achieves the same dataplane performance with 10× less CPU usage under realistic workloads. Additionally, eBPF benefits SPRIGHT, by replacing heavyweight serverless components, allowing us to keep functions 'warm' with negligible penalty.
Our preliminary experimental results show that SPRIGHT achieves an order of magnitude improvement in throughput and latency compared to Knative, while substantially reducing CPU usage, and obviates the need for 'cold-start'.
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This content will become publicly available on July 1, 2024
INDIANA—In-Network Distributed Infrastructure for Advanced Network Applications
Data volumes are exploding as sensors proliferate and become more capable. Edge computing is envisioned as a path to distribute processing and reduce latency. Many models of Edge computing consider small devices running conventional software. Our model includes a more lightweight execution engine for network microservices and a network scheduling framework to configure network processing elements to process streams and direct the appropriate traffic to them. In this article, we describe INDIANA, a complete framework for in-network microservices. We will describe how the two components-the INDIANA network Processing Element (InPE) and the Flange Network Operating System (NOS)-work together to achieve effective in-network processing to improve performance in edge to cloud environments. Our processing elements provide lightweight compute units optimized for efficient stream processing. These elements are customizable and vary in sophistication and resource consumption. The Flange NOS provides first-class flow based reasoning to drive function placement, network configuration, and load balancing that can respond dynamically to network conditions. We describe design considerations and discuss our approach and implementations. We evaluate the performance of stream processing and examine the performance of several exemplar applications on networks of increasing scale and complexity.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 2126266
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10473346
- Publisher / Repository:
- The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
- Volume:
- 37
- Issue:
- 3-4
- ISSN:
- 1094-3420
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 442 to 461
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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