Is Function-as-a-Service a Good Fit for Latency-Critical Services?
Haoran Qiu, Saurabh Jha, Subho S. Banerjee, Archit Patke, Chen Wang, Hubertus Franke, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar K. Iyer
Abstract
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is becoming an increasingly popular cloud-deployment paradigm for serverless computing that frees application developers from managing the infrastructure. At the same time, it allows cloud providers to assert control in workload consolidation, i.e., co-locating multiple containers on the same server, thereby achieving higher server utilization, often at the cost of higher end-to-end function request latency. Interestingly, a key aspect of serverless latency management has not been well studied: the trade-off between application developers' latency goals and the FaaS providers' utilization goals.