Serverless Computing: An Investigation of Factors Influencing Microservice Performance Wes Lloyd1, Shruti Ramesh4, Swetha Chinthalapati2, Lan Ly3, Shrideep Pallickara5 5 Institute of Technology 4 Department of Computer Science University of Washington Microsoft Colorado State University Tacoma, Washington USA Redmond, Washington USA Fort Collins, Colorado USA 1wlloyd, 2swethach,
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract— Serverless computing platforms provide driving a paradigm shift rivaling a scale not seen since the function(s)-as-a-Service (FaaS) to end users while promising advent of cloud computing itself! reduced hosting costs, high availability, fault tolerance, and dynamic elasticity for hosting individual functions known as Fundamentally different than application hosting with IaaS microservices. Serverless Computing environments, unlike or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds, with serverless Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms, abstract computing, applications are decomposed into many infrastructure management including creation of virtual machines microservices, which are essentially disparate functions. (VMs), operating system containers, and request load balancing Serverless environments leverage operating system containers from users. To conserve cloud server capacity and energy, cloud such as Docker to deploy and scale microservices [6]. Granular providers allow hosting infrastructure to go COLD, code deployment harnessing containers enables incremental, deprovisioning containers when service demand is low freeing rapid scaling of server infrastructure surpassing the elasticity infrastructure to be harnessed by others. In this paper, we present afforded by dynamically scaling virtual machines (VMs). Cloud results from our comprehensive investigation into the factors providers can load balance many small container placements which influence microservice performance afforded by serverless across servers helping to minimize idle server capacity better computing.