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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’. 

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'. 

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.