Benchmarking, analysis, and optimization of serverless function snapshots
Dmitrii Ustiugov, Plamen Petrov, Marios Kogias, Edouard Bugnion, Boris Grot
Abstract
Serverless computing has seen rapid adoption due to its high scalability and flexible, pay-as-you-go billing model. In serverless, developers structure their services as a collection of functions, sporadically invoked by various events like clicks. High inter-arrival time variability of function invocations motivates the providers to start new function instances upon each invocation, leading to significant cold-start delays that degrade user experience. To reduce cold-start latency, the industry has turned to snapshotting, whereby an image of a fully-booted function is stored on disk, enabling a faster invocation compared to booting a function from scratch.
Topics & Concepts
Computer scienceScalabilityBenchmarkingSnapshot (computer storage)Operating systemOrchestrationFunction (biology)Latency (audio)HypervisorDistributed computingCloud computingVirtualizationVisual artsEvolutionary biologyMarketingTelecommunicationsArtBusinessBiologyMusicalCloud Computing and Resource ManagementIoT and Edge/Fog ComputingPeer-to-Peer Network Technologies