Short-lived Datacenter

TL;DR

This paper introduces Boxer, a system that enables existing applications to run on serverless platforms like AWS Lambda with minimal modifications, providing fine-grained elasticity similar to data-centers.

Contribution

Boxer is a novel system that allows unmodified VM-based applications to run on serverless platforms, bridging the gap between traditional data-centers and serverless environments.

Findings

Boxer successfully runs off-the-shelf cloud applications on AWS Lambda.

It provides transparent network interfaces for serverless functions.

Applications benefit from fine-grain elasticity comparable to data-centers.

Abstract

Serverless platforms have attracted attention due to their promise of elasticity, low cost, and fast deployment. Instead of using a fixed virtual machine (VM) infrastructure, which can incur considerable costs to operate and run, serverless platforms support short computations, triggered on demand, with cost proportional to fine-grain function execution time. However, serverless platforms offer a restricted execution environment. For example, functions have limited execution times, limited resources, and no support for networking between functions. In this paper, we explore what it takes to treat serverless platforms as short-lived, general purpose data-centers which can execute unmodified existing applications. As a first step in this quest, we have developed Boxer, a system providing an execution environment on top of existing functions-as-a-service platforms that allows users to seamlessly migrate conventional VM-based cloud services to serverless platforms. Boxer allows generic applications to benefit from the fine-grain elasticity of serverless platforms without having to modify applications to adopt a restrictive event-triggered programming model or orchestrate auxiliary systems for data communication. We implement Boxer on top of AWS Lambda and extend it to transparently provide standard network interfaces. We describe its implementation and demonstrate how it can be used to run off-the-shelf cloud applications with a degree of fine-grained elasticity not available on traditional VM-based platforms.