Characterizing serverless platforms with serverlessbench
Serverless computing promises auto-scalability and cost-efficiency (in "pay-as-you-go" manner) for high-productive software development. Because of its virtue, serverless computing has motivated increasingly new applications and services in the cloud. This, however, also presents new challenges including how to efficiently design high-performance serverless platforms and how to efficiently program on the platforms. This paper proposes ServerlessBench, an open-source benchmark suite for characterizing serverless platforms. It includes test cases exploring characteristic metrics of serverless computing, e.g., communication efficiency, startup latency, stateless overhead, and performance isolation. We have applied the benchmark suite to evaluate the most popular serverless computing platforms, including AWS Lambda, Open-Whisk, and Fn, and present new serverless implications from the study. For example, we show scenarios where decoupling an application into a composition of serverless functions can be beneficial in cost-saving and performance, and that the "stateless" property in serverless computing can hurt the execution performance of serverless functions. These implications form several design guidelines, which may help platform designers to optimize serverless platforms and application developers to design their functions best fit to the platforms.
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