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System Improvements for FaaS

A large category of serverless research involves system improvements to FaaS. There is a tension between providing isolation, efficient multiplexing, and low-latency performance. OpenLambda [1] and McGrath et al. [2] both developed early prototype FaaS systems that mirrored the inner workings of FaaS platforms and helped illustrate this research challenge.

One manifestation of the tension is in cold starts. SOCK [3] uses various systems techniques to reduce these, particularly for FaaS applications that use libraries with high initialization costs. Catalyzer [4] takes on the same challenge, using checkpoints to start functions instead of executing their initialization code. Xanadu [5] provides techniques for mitigating cascading cold starts, and Mohan et al. [6] discuss techniques for preallocating resources such as network interfaces to reduce cold start times.

FaaS also incurs cold start latencies and other overheads from the underlying operating system and hypervisor. Firecracker [7] is a lightweight microVM technology developed by AWS that reduces the startup times and memory requirements of VM isolation. Koller and Williams [8] have suggested using unikernels with FaaS instead of traditional operating systems in a further bid to improve efficiency. There are also alternatives to using VMs for isolation. Faasm [9] provides lightweight isolation based on WebAssembly [10]. Alto [11] generalizes lightweight virtualization to other managed runtime environments.

Isolation not only creates startup costs but ongoing runtime costs as well. Young et al. [12] study the performance overheads of gVisor [13], which is used by Google’s serverless products. Anjali et al. [14] compare serverless isolation mechanisms, including Linux containers, gVisor, and Firecracker microVMs.

Even when no cold starts are involved, the latency of FaaS function invocation can be too high for some applications. Contributing factors include overheads of passing data, queuing overheads, and scheduling overheads or delays. Sonic [15], SAND [16], SEUSS [17], and Cloudburst [18] all address various aspects of these slowdowns.

Work on scheduling includes that by Kaffes et al. [19], which uses a centralized scheduler with a global view to eliminate imbalances. FnSched [20] offers another scheduler that aims to improve latency and utilization, and Caerus [21] provides scheduling for serverless analytics. Work by Mahmoudi et al. describes an algorithm for adaptive function placement.

A diverse assortment set of other work seeks to improve FaaS. Shredder [22] embeds FaaS computations with object storage. Faa$T [23] provides a provider-managed cache for serverless applications. Particle is a network overlay suited to the burstiness of serverless computing [24]. Gupta [25] et al. demonstrate straggler mitigation using error-correcting codes. Kappa [26] provides fault tolerance and extended execution times by checkpointing and restarting FaaS applications. InfiniCache [27] shows how to use erasure coding to build a cache from idle FaaS instances. Harvest VMs [28] allows FaaS to run using resources momentarily left idle by traditional server VMs.


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