FaaSdom: A Benchmark Suite for Serverless Computing

TL;DR

FaaSdom is an open-source benchmark suite designed to evaluate and compare the performance and costs of various serverless computing platforms across multiple providers and languages, automating deployment and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, automated benchmark suite for serverless platforms that supports multiple providers, languages, and provides performance and cost insights.

Findings

Supports AWS, Azure, Google, IBM platforms

Automates deployment, execution, and cleanup

Provides historical performance and cost estimates

Abstract

Serverless computing has become a major trend among cloud providers. With serverless computing, developers fully delegate the task of managing the servers, dynamically allocating the required resources, as well as handling availability and fault-tolerance matters to the cloud provider. In doing so, developers can solely focus on the application logic of their software, which is then deployed and completely managed in the cloud. Despite its increasing popularity, not much is known regarding the actual system performance achievable on the currently available serverless platforms. Specifically, it is cumbersome to benchmark such systems in a language- or runtime-independent manner. Instead, one must resort to a full application deployment, to later take informed decisions on the most convenient solution along several dimensions, including performance and economic costs. FaaSdom is a modular architecture and proof-of-concept implementation of a benchmark suite for serverless computing platforms. It currently supports the current mainstream serverless cloud providers (i.e., AWS, Azure, Google, IBM), a large set of benchmark tests and a variety of implementation languages. The suite fully automatizes the deployment, execution and clean-up of such tests, providing insights (including historical) on the performance observed by serverless applications. FaaSdom also integrates a model to estimate budget costs for deployments across the supported providers. FaaSdom is open-source and available at https://github.com/bschitter/benchmark-suite-serverless-computing.