Proactive Serverless Function Resource Management

TL;DR

This paper presents 'freshen', a proactive primitive for serverless runtimes that improves responsiveness by executing preparatory tasks before functions run, supported by design, implementation, and preliminary results.

Contribution

Introduction of 'freshen', a novel primitive enabling proactive execution in serverless environments to reduce latency and improve responsiveness.

Findings

Potential for reduced latency in serverless functions

Feasibility of predictive execution within time windows

Preliminary results indicate performance benefits

Abstract

This paper introduces a new primitive to serverless language runtimes called freshen. With freshen, developers or providers specify functionality to perform before a given function executes. This proactive technique allows for overheads associated with serverless functions to be mitigated at execution time, which improves function responsiveness. We show various predictive opportunities exist to run freshen within reasonable time windows. A high-level design and implementation are described, along with preliminary results to show the potential benefits of our scheme.