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Burst-parallel serverless applications invoke thousands of short-lived distributed functions to complete complex jobs such as data analytics, video encoding, or compilation. While these tasks execute in seconds, starting and configuring the virtual network they rely on is a major bottleneck that can consume up to 84% of total startup time. In this paper we characterize the magnitude of this network cold start problem in three popular overlay networks, Docker Swarm, Weave, and Linux Overlay. We focus on end-to-end startup time that encompasses both the time to boot a group of containers as well as interconnecting them. Our primary observation is that existing overlay approaches for serverless networking scale poorly in short-lived serverless environments. Based on our findings we develop Particle, a network stack tailored for multi-node serverless overlay networks that optimizes network creation without sacrificing multi-tenancy, generality, or throughput. When integrated into a serverless burst-parallel video processing pipeline, Particle improves application runtime by 2.4--3X over existing overlays. 

Sprocket is a highly configurable, stage-based, scalable, serverless video processing framework that exploits intra-video parallelism to achieve low latency. Sprocket enables developers to program a series of operations over video content in a modular, extensible manner. Programmers implement custom operations, ranging from simple video transformations to more complex computer vision tasks, in a simple pipeline specification language to construct custom video processing pipelines. Sprocket then handles the underlying access, encoding and decoding, and processing of video and image content across operations in a highly parallel manner. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the Sprocket system on the AWS Lambda serverless cloud infrastructure, and evaluate Sprocket under a variety of conditions to show that it delivers its performance goals of high parallelism, low latency, and low cost (10s of seconds to process a 3,600 second video 1000-way parallel for less than $3).