TY - GEN
T1 - Towards Demystifying Intra-Function Parallelism in Serverless Computing
AU - Kiener, Michael
AU - Chadha, Mohak
AU - Gerndt, Michael
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/12/6
Y1 - 2021/12/6
N2 - Serverless computing offers a pay-per-use model with high elasticity and automatic scaling for a wide range of applications. Since cloud providers abstract most of the underlying infrastructure, these services work similarly to black-boxes. As a result, users can influence the resources allocated to their functions, but might not be aware that they have to parallelize them to profit from the additionally allocated virtual CPUs (vCPUs). In this paper, we analyze the impact of parallelization within a single function and container instance for AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions (GCF), and Google Cloud Run (GCR). We focus on compute-intensive workloads since they benefit greatly from parallelization. Furthermore, we investigate the correlation between the number of allocated CPU cores and vCPUs in serverless environments. Our results show that the number of available cores to a function/container instance does not always equal the number of allocated vCPUs. By parallelizing serverless workloads, we observed cost savings up to 81% for AWS Lambda, 49% for GCF, and 69.8% for GCR.
AB - Serverless computing offers a pay-per-use model with high elasticity and automatic scaling for a wide range of applications. Since cloud providers abstract most of the underlying infrastructure, these services work similarly to black-boxes. As a result, users can influence the resources allocated to their functions, but might not be aware that they have to parallelize them to profit from the additionally allocated virtual CPUs (vCPUs). In this paper, we analyze the impact of parallelization within a single function and container instance for AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions (GCF), and Google Cloud Run (GCR). We focus on compute-intensive workloads since they benefit greatly from parallelization. Furthermore, we investigate the correlation between the number of allocated CPU cores and vCPUs in serverless environments. Our results show that the number of available cores to a function/container instance does not always equal the number of allocated vCPUs. By parallelizing serverless workloads, we observed cost savings up to 81% for AWS Lambda, 49% for GCF, and 69.8% for GCR.
KW - Container-as-a-Service
KW - Cost
KW - Function-as-a-Service
KW - Parallel execution
KW - Parallelization
KW - Performance
KW - Serverless
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85121472612&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3493651.3493672
DO - 10.1145/3493651.3493672
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85121472612
T3 - Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Serverless Computing, WoSC 2021
SP - 42
EP - 49
BT - Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Serverless Computing, WoSC 2021
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 7th International Workshop on Serverless Computing, WoSC 2021
Y2 - 6 December 2021
ER -