BenchFaaS: Benchmarking Serverless Functions in an Edge Computing Network Testbed

TL;DR

BenchFaaS is an open-source testbed designed to benchmark serverless functions in diverse edge computing environments, evaluating performance under various hardware and network conditions to inform infrastructure design.

Contribution

This paper introduces BenchFaaS, a novel open-source testbed for benchmarking serverless functions specifically in edge computing networks with heterogeneous hardware.

Findings

Edge computing networks can effectively support serverless functions.

Performance varies significantly with hardware and network conditions.

Properly dimensioned edge infrastructure improves serverless performance.

Abstract

The serverless computing model has evolved as one of the key solutions in the cloud for fast autoscaling and capacity planning. In edge computing environments, however, the serverless model is challenged by the system heterogeneity and performance variability. In this paper, we introduce BenchFaaS, an open-source edge computing network testbed which automates the deployment and benchmarking of serverless functions. Our edge computing network considers a cluster of virtual machines and Raspberry Pis, and is designed to benchmark serverless functions under different hardware and network conditions. We measure and evaluate: (i) overhead incurred by testbed, (ii) performance of compute intensive tasks, (iii) impact of application payload size, (iv) scalability, and (v) performance of chained serverless functions. We share the lessons learnt in engineering and implementing the testbed. We present the measurement results and analyze the impact of networked infrastructure on serverless performance. The measurements indicate that a properly dimensioned edge computing network can effectively serve as a serverless infrastructure.