SMSE: A Serverless Platform for Multimedia Cloud Systems

TL;DR

SMSE introduces a domain-specific serverless platform tailored for multimedia streaming, enhancing efficiency and reducing processing time by up to 30%, thereby enabling rapid development and optimized resource utilization.

Contribution

This paper presents the first domain-specific serverless platform for multimedia streaming, with a novel container provisioning method that adapts to function characteristics for improved efficiency.

Findings

Reduces containerization overhead by up to 30%

Improves multimedia processing service times

Demonstrates effectiveness in real-world settings

Abstract

Along with the rise of domain-specific computing (ASICs hardware) and domain-specific programming languages, we envision that the next step is the emergence of domain-specific cloud platforms. Developing such platforms for popular applications in the serverless manner, not only can offer a higher efficiency to both users and providers, it can also expedite the application development cycles and enable users to become solution-oriented and focus on their specific business logic. Considering multimedia streaming as one of the most trendy applications in the IT industry, the goal of this study is to develop SMSE, the first domain-specific serverless platform for multimedia streaming. SMSE democratizes multimedia service development via enabling content providers (or even end-users) to rapidly develop their desired functionalities on their multimedia contents. Upon developing SMSE, the next goal of this study is to deal with its efficiency challenges and develop a function container provisioning method that can efficiently utilize cloud resources and improve the users' QoS. In particular, we develop a dynamic method that provisions durable or ephemeral containers depending on the spatiotemporal and data-dependency characteristics of the functions. Evaluating the prototype implementation of SMSE under real-world settings demonstrates its capability to reduce both the containerization overhead, and the makespan time of serving multimedia processing functions (by up to 30%) in compare to the function provision methods that are being used in the general-purpose serverless cloud systems.