Poster: Addressing Performance Challenges in Serverless Computing @ ICPE 2018

April 11, 2018 · 1 minute read

As part of the SPEC RG CLOUD, we were invited to present a poster on our serverless activity at ICPE 2018.

The poster itself is an adaptation of the one I presented at ICTOPEN 2018. We made small changes to the poster to emphasise the work of the group over my personal research.

We presented the poster at two different occasions: once at the end of the HotCloudPerf 2018 workshop; and once at during the poster session of ICPE 2018. Although, both sessions were rather short, there was a lot of interest in the our work on serverless - far more than at ICTOPEN. All in all, it was fun! :)

abstract As a key part of the emerging serverless computing paradigm, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms allow users to run arbitrary functions without being concerned about operational issues. However, there are several (performance-related) challenges surrounding the state-of-the-art FaaS platforms that can hinder widespread adoption of FaaS, including size-able overheads, unreliable performance, and the absence of benchmarks. In this work provide an overview of our ongoing work towards addressing these challenges. Thus far, we have been building a workflow engine, Fission Workflows, to provide efficient function composition within the FaaS model. Furthermore, together with the SPEC CLOUD RG, we have been working on solving more high-level challenges; defining a common terminology and reference architecture, as well as developing a industry-wide benchmark of these FaaS platforms. Besides presenting our work so far, we also propose a roadmap towards solving these challenges to invite researchers to join this effort.

Poster