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FlashCube: Fast Provisioning of Serverless Functions with Streamlined Container Runtimes

Authors:

Kao-Feng Hsieh,

Hui LuAuthors Info & Claims

PLOS '21: Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Pages 38 - 45

https://doi.org/10.1145/3477113.3487273

Published: 25 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Fast provisioning of serverless functions is salient for serverless platforms. Though lightweight sandboxes (e.g., containers) enclose only necessary files and libraries, a cold launch still requires up to a few seconds to complete. Such slow provisioning prolongs the response time of serverless functions and negatively impacts users' experiences. This paper analyzes the main reasons for such slowdown and introduces an effective containerization framework, FlashCube. Instead of building a container from scratch, FlashCube quickly and efficiently assembles it through a group of pre-created general container parts (e.g., namespaces, cgroups, and language runtimes). In addition, FlashCube's user-space implementation makes it easily applicable to existing commodity serverless platforms. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrates that FlashCube can quickly provision containerized functions in less than 10 ms (vs. ~400 ms using Docker containers).

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Cited By

Segarra CDurev IPietzuch P(2024)Is It Time To Put Cold Starts In The Deep Freeze?Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698527(259-268)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698038.3698527
Yang YDu DSong HXia Y(2024)On-demand and Parallel Checkpoint/Restore for GPU ApplicationsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698510(415-433)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698038.3698510
Sui YYu HHu YLi JWang H(2024)Pre-Warming is Not Enough: Accelerating Serverless Inference With Opportunistic Pre-LoadingProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698509(178-195)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698038.3698509
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cover image ACM Conferences

PLOS '21: Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

October 2021

96 pages

ISBN:9781450387071

DOI:10.1145/3477113

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 25 October 2021

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SOSP '21: ACM SIGOPS 28th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

October 25, 2021

Virtual Event, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 32 submissions, 53%

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Cited By

Segarra CDurev IPietzuch P(2024)Is It Time To Put Cold Starts In The Deep Freeze?Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698527(259-268)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698038.3698527
Yang YDu DSong HXia Y(2024)On-demand and Parallel Checkpoint/Restore for GPU ApplicationsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698510(415-433)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698038.3698510
Sui YYu HHu YLi JWang H(2024)Pre-Warming is Not Enough: Accelerating Serverless Inference With Opportunistic Pre-LoadingProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698509(178-195)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698038.3698509
Liu YGuo JJiang BZhang PSun XSong YRen WHou ZLyu BWen RZhu SWang XVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Understanding Network Startup for Secure Containers in Multi-Tenant Clouds: Performance, Bottleneck and OptimizationProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688436(635-650)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3688436

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