ProPack: Executing Concurrent Serverless Functions Faster and Cheaper
Rohan Basu Roy, Tirthak Patel, Richmond Liew, Yadu Babuji, Ryan Chard, Devesh Tiwari
Abstract
The serverless computing model has been on the rise in recent years due to a lower barrier to entry and elastic scalability. However, our experimental evidence suggests that multiple serverless computing platforms suffer from serious performance inefficiencies when a high number of concurrent function instances are invoked, which is a desirable capability for parallel applications. To mitigate this challenge, this paper introduces ProPack, a novel solution that provides higher performance and yields cost savings for end users running applications with high concurrency. ProPack leverages insights obtained from experimental study to build a simple and effective analytical model that mitigates the scalability bottleneck. Our evaluation on multiple serverless platforms including AWS Lambda and Google confirms that ProPack can improve average performance by 85% and save cost by 66%. ProPack provides significant improvement (over 50%) over the state-of-the-art serverless workload manager such as Pywren, and is also, effective at mitigating the concurrency bottleneck for FuncX, a recent on-premise serverless execution platform for parallel applications.