Supporting Multi-Cloud in Serverless Computing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-cloud library and architecture to compare, integrate, and deploy serverless functions across multiple providers, addressing vendor lock-in and performance challenges.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-cloud library and architecture supporting cross-provider serverless deployment, performance comparison, and workload portability.

Findings

Developed End Analysis System (EAS) for provider comparison

Designed multi-cloud architectures with domain-specific offerings

Evaluated public FaaS performance and cost

Abstract

Serverless computing is a widely adopted cloud execution model composed of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) offerings. The increased level of abstraction makes vendor lock-in inherent to serverless computing, raising more concerns than previous cloud paradigms. Multi-cloud serverless is a promising emerging approach against vendor lock-in, yet multiple challenges must be overcome to tap its potential. First, we need to be aware of both the performance and cost of each FaaS provider. Second, a multi-cloud architecture must be proposed before deploying a multi-cloud workflow. Domain-specific serverless offerings must then be integrated into the multi-cloud architecture to improve performance or save costs. Moreover, dealing with serverless offerings from multiple providers is challenging. Finally, we require workload portability support for serverless multi-cloud. In this paper, we present a multi-cloud library for cross-serverless offerings. We develop the End Analysis System (EAS) to support comparison among public FaaS providers in terms of performance and cost. Moreover, we design proof-of-concept multi-cloud architectures with domain-specific serverless offerings to alleviate problems such as data gravity. Finally, we deploy workloads on these architectures to evaluate several public FaaS offerings.