skip to main content
10.1145/3481646.3481657acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesiccbdcConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

A Greedy Load Balancing Algorithm for FaaS Platforms

Published: 26 November 2021 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new load balancing algorithm for function-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms. We argue that the load balancing algorithm greatly affects the performance of FaaS platforms because heavy operations, such as virtualization and initialization, can be reduced using caching techniques. We demonstrate that a load balancing algorithm that provides higher locality could accelerate the FaaS platforms by increasing the cache-hit ratio, and propose a greedy load balancing algorithm optimized for FaaS. To generalize the experimental results, we conducted the experiment under three different caching policies that could be adopted in various FaaS platforms. Our evaluation reveals that load balancing algorithms with higher locality and a uniform load balance exhibit better results in all three caching policies, and our proposed algorithm achieves better performance compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

References

[1]
C. L. Abad, E. F. Boza, and E. Van Eyk, “Package-aware scheduling of faas functions,” in Companion of the 2018 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering. ACM, 2018, pp. 101–106.
[2]
“2018 serverless community survey: huge growth in serverless,” https://serverless.com/blog/2018-serverless-community-survey-huge-growth-usage.
[3]
I. Baldini, P. Castro, K. Chang, P. Cheng, S. Fink, V. Ishakian, N. Mitchell, V. Muthusamy, R. Rabbah, A. Slominskiet al., “Serverless computing: Current trends and open problems,” in Research Advances in Cloud Computing. Springer, 2017, pp. 1–20.
[4]
W. Ling, L. Ma, C. Tian, and Z. Hu, “Pigeon: A dynamic and efficient serverless and faas framework for private cloud,” in 2019 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence(CSCI). IEEE, 2019, pp. 1416–1421.
[5]
K. Solaiman and M. A. Adnan, “Wlec: A not so cold architecture to mitigate cold start problem in serverless computing,” in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). IEEE, 2020, pp. 144–153.
[6]
I. E. Akkus, R. Chen, I. Rimac, M. Stein, K. Satzke, A. Beck, P. Aditya, and V. Hilt, “{SAND}: Towards high-performance serverless computing,” in 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 18), 2018, pp. 923–935.
[7]
P.-M. Lin and A. Glikson, “Mitigating Cold Starts in Serverless Platforms: A Pool-Based Approach,” arXiv e-prints, p arXiv:1903.12221, Mar 2019.
[8]
G. Aumala, E. Boza, L. Ortiz-Avil ́es, G. Totoy, and C. Abad, “Beyond load balancing: Package-aware scheduling for serverless platforms,” in 2019 19th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGRID), May 2019, pp. 282–291.
[9]
S. Boucher, A. Kalia, D. G. Andersen, and M. Kaminsky, “Putting the "micro" back in microservice,” in2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIXATC 18). Boston, MA: USENIX Association, Jul. 2018, pp. 645–650.
[10]
T. H. Johannes Manner, Martin Endreß and G. Wirtz, “Cold start influencing factors in function as a service,” in2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing Companion (UCC Companion), 2018, pp. 181–188.
[11]
W. Lloyd, S. Ramesh, S. Chinthalapati, L. Ly, and S. Pallickara, “Serverless computing: An investigation of factors influencing microservice performance,” in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). IEEE, 2018, pp. 159–169.
[12]
L. Wang, M. Li, Y. Zhang, T. Ristenpart, and M. Swift, “Peeking behind the curtains of serverless platforms,” in 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 18), 2018, pp. 133–146.
[13]
E. Van Eyk, A. Iosup, S. Seif, and M. Th ̈ommes, “The spec cloud group's research vision on faas and serverless architectures,” in Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Serverless Computing. ACM, 2017, pp. 1–4.
[14]
Apache OpenWhisk is a serverless, open source cloud platform, [online] Available: https://openwhisk.apache.org/ [Last accessed: Mar 09, 2021]
[15]
fission/fission: Fast and Simple Serverless Functions for Kubernetes, [online] Available: https://github.com/fission/fission [Last accessed: Mar 09, 2021]
[16]
S. Hendrickson, S. Sturdevant, T. Harter, V. Venkataramani, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau, “Serverless computation with openlambda,” in 8th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud 16), 2016.
[17]
D. Karger, A. Sherman, A. Berkheimer, B. Bogstad, R. Dhanidina, K. Iwamoto, B. Kim, L. Matkins, and Y. Yerushalmi, “Web caching with consistent hashing,” Computer Networks, vol. 31, no. 11-16, pp.1203–1213, 1999.
[18]
V. Mirrokni, M. Thorup, and M. Zadimoghaddam, “Consistent hashing with bounded loads,” in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 2018, pp. 587–604. [Online]. Available: https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/1.9781611975031.39
[19]
E. Oakes, L. Yang, K. Houck, T. Harter, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau, “Pipsqueak: Lean lambdas with large libraries,” in 2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (ICDCSW), June 2017, pp. 395–400.
[20]
E. Jonas, J. Schleier-Smith, V. Sreekanti, C.-C. Tsai, A. Khandelwal, Q. Pu, V. Shankar, J. Carreira, K. Krauth, N. Yadwadkar, J. E. Gonzalez, R. A. Popa, I. Stoica, and D. A. Patterson, “Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing”, arXiv e-prints, p. arXiv:1902.03383, Feb 2019.
[21]
D. Jackson and G. Clynch, “An investigation of the impact of language runtime on the performance and cost of serverless functions”, in 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing Companion (UCC Companion). IEEE, 2018, pp. 154–160

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Rise of the Planet of Serverless Computing: A Systematic ReviewACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357964332:5(1-61)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Leveraging Community Structure in FaaS Functions for Load Balancing2023 IEEE International Conference on Satellite Computing (Satellite)10.1109/Satellite59115.2023.00019(57-58)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2023
  • (2022)CASY: A CPU Cache Allocation System for FaaS Platform2022 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)10.1109/CCGrid54584.2022.00059(494-503)Online publication date: May-2022

Index Terms

  1. A Greedy Load Balancing Algorithm for FaaS Platforms
        Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image ACM Other conferences
        ICCBDC '21: Proceedings of the 2021 5th International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing
        August 2021
        122 pages
        ISBN:9781450390408
        DOI:10.1145/3481646
        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]

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 26 November 2021

        Permissions

        Request permissions for this article.

        Check for updates

        Qualifiers

        • Research-article
        • Research
        • Refereed limited

        Funding Sources

        • Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP)

        Conference

        ICCBDC 2021

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • Downloads (Last 12 months)27
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
        Reflects downloads up to 25 Feb 2025

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all
        • (2023)Rise of the Planet of Serverless Computing: A Systematic ReviewACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357964332:5(1-61)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2023
        • (2023)Leveraging Community Structure in FaaS Functions for Load Balancing2023 IEEE International Conference on Satellite Computing (Satellite)10.1109/Satellite59115.2023.00019(57-58)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2023
        • (2022)CASY: A CPU Cache Allocation System for FaaS Platform2022 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)10.1109/CCGrid54584.2022.00059(494-503)Online publication date: May-2022

        View Options

        Login options

        View options

        PDF

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader

        HTML Format

        View this article in HTML Format.

        HTML Format

        Figures

        Tables

        Media

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media