Feasibility of Serverless Cloud Services for Disaster Management Information Systems

Serverless is the new generation of cloud services that supports the pay-per-use policy in true spirit by charging only for the execution time of the hosted code. Amazon introduced serverless service of Lambda in 2014 and it is consider as the most popular serverless cloud service till date. This paper focuses on the serverless cloud services of Lambda and elaborates the importance of Lambda based serverless cloud services for hosting the disaster management information systems (DMIS). We have identified two repeatedly occurring phases of the life cycle of a DMIS viz. low activity phase and high activity phase. Our findings state that serverless cloud services are well-suited for both of these phases of a DMIS. Serverless reduces the operational cost during the low activity phase by detaching the code from running containers and it improves the scalability during the high activity phase by quickly assigning the already available containers from the container pool. However, this all comes with the price of reduced QoS (Quality of Service) for initial requests after specific idle duration and our experimental results report the QoS degradation with respect to idle time for Lambda service