No Provisioned Concurrency: Fast RDMA-codesigned Remote Fork for Serverless Computing

Serverless platforms essentially face a tradeoff between container startup time and provisioned concurrency (i.e., cached instances), which is further exaggerated by the frequent need for remote container initialization. This paper presents MITOSIS, an operating system primitive that provides fast remote fork, which exploits a deep codesign of the OS kernel with RDMA. By leveraging the fast remote read capability of RDMA and partial state transfer across serverless containers, MITOSIS bridges the performance gap between local and remote container initialization. MITOSIS is the first to fork over 10,000 new containers from one instance across multiple machines within a second, while allowing the new containers to efficiently transfer the pre-materialized states of the forked one. We have implemented MITOSIS on Linux and integrated it with FN, a popular serverless platform. Under load spikes in real-world serverless workloads, MITOSIS reduces the function tail latency by 89% with orders of magnitude lower memory usage. For serverless workflow that requires state transfer, MITOSIS improves its execution time by 86%.Comment: To appear in OSDI'2

Réplication de requêtes pour la tolérance aux pannes de FaaS

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a popular programming model for building serverless applications, supported by all major cloud providers and many open-source software frameworks. One of the main challenges for FaaS providers is providing fault-tolerance for the deployed applications. The basic fault-tolerance mechanism in current FaaS platforms is automatically retrying function invocations. Although the retry mechanism is well suited for transient faults, it incurs delays in recovering from other types of faults, such as node crashes. This paper proposes the integration of a Request Replication mechanism in FaaS platforms and describes how this integration was implemented in a well-known, open-source platform. The paper provides a detailed experimental comparison of the proposed mechanism with the retry mechanism and an Active-Standby mechanism under different failure scenarios.Le Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) est un modèle de programmation populaire pour la création d’applications sans serveur, pris en charge par tous les principaux fournisseurs de cloud et de nombreux frameworks logiciels open source. L’un des principaux défis pour les fournisseurs de FaaS est de fournir une tolérance aux pannes pour les applications déployées. Le mécanisme de base de tolérance aux pannes des plates-formes FaaS actuelles réessaie automatiquement les appels de fonction. Bien que le mécanisme de nouvelle tentative soit bien adapté aux pannestransitoires, il entraîne des retards dans la récupération d’autres types de pannes, telles que les pannes de noeuds. Cet article propose l’intégration d’un mécanisme de réplication de requêtes dans les plates-formes FaaS et décrit comment cette intégration a été implémentée dans une plate-forme open source bien connue. L’article fournit une comparaison expérimentale détaillée du mécanisme proposé avec le mécanisme de nouvelle tentative et un mécanisme Active-Standby sous différents scénarios de panne

Using Unused: Non-Invasive Dynamic FaaS Infrastructure with HPC-Whisk

Modern HPC workload managers and their careful tuning contribute to the high utilization of HPC clusters. However, due to inevitable uncertainty it is impossible to completely avoid node idleness. Although such idle slots are usually too short for any HPC job, they are too long to ignore them. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm promisingly fills this gap, and can be a good match, as typical FaaS functions last seconds, not hours. Here we show how to build a FaaS infrastructure on idle nodes in an HPC cluster in such a way that it does not affect the performance of the HPC jobs significantly. We dynamically adapt to a changing set of idle physical machines, by integrating open-source software Slurm and OpenWhisk. We designed and implemented a prototype solution that allowed us to cover up to 90\% of the idle time slots on a 50k-core cluster that runs production workloads

Rise of the Planet of Serverless Computing: A Systematic Review

Serverless computing is an emerging cloud computing paradigm, being adopted to develop a wide range of software applications. It allows developers to focus on the application logic in the granularity of function, thereby freeing developers from tedious and error-prone infrastructure management. Meanwhile, its unique characteristic poses new challenges to the development and deployment of serverless-based applications. To tackle these challenges, enormous research efforts have been devoted. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review to characterize the current research state of serverless computing. Specifically, this paper covers 164 papers on 17 research directions of serverless computing, including performance optimization, programming framework, application migration, multi-cloud development, testing and debugging, etc. It also derives research trends, focus, and commonly-used platforms for serverless computing, as well as promising research opportunities

Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering:Programming abstractions for autonomy and decentralization

We review the main ideas and elements of Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering (IOSE), a program of research that we have pursued for the last two decades, a span of time in which it has grown from philosophy to practical programming abstractions. What distinguishes IOSE from any other program of research is its emphasis on supporting autonomy by modeling the meaning of communication and using that as the basis for engineering decentralized sociotechnical systems. Meaning sounds esoteric but is the basis for practical decision making and a holy grail for the field of distributed systems. We describe our contributions so far, directions for research, and the potential for broad impact on computing