Serverless in the wild: characterizing and optimising the serverless workload at a large cloud provider
Serverless in the wild: characterizing and optimising the serverless workload at a large cloud provider, Shahrad et al., arXiv 2020
This is a fresh-from-the-arXivs paper that Jonathan Mace (@mpi_jcmace) drew my attention to on Twitter last week, thank you Jonathan!
It’s a classic trade-off: the quality of service offered (better service presumably driving more volume at the same cost point), vs the cost to provide that service. It’s a trade-off at least, so long as a classic assumption holds, that a higher quality product costs more to produce/provide. This assumption seems to be deeply ingrained in many of us – explaining for example why higher cost goods are often implicitly associated with higher quality. Every once in a while though a point in the design space can be discovered where we don’t have to trade-off quality and cost, where we can have both a higher quality product and a lower unit cost.
Today’s paper analyses serverless workloads on Azure (the characterisation of those workloads is interesting in its own right), where users want fast function start times (avoiding cold starts), and the cloud provider wants to minimise resources consumed (costs). With fine-grained, usage based billing, resources used to Continue reading
