CloudSimSC: A Toolkit for Modeling and Simulation of Serverless Computing Environments

TL;DR

CloudSimSC is a flexible, modular simulation toolkit extending CloudSim to model serverless computing environments, enabling resource management testing without costly real-world experiments.

Contribution

We developed CloudSimSC, a novel, adaptable simulation tool that models serverless environments with key resource management features and monitoring capabilities.

Findings

Supports modeling of function scheduling and scaling

Enables evaluation of resource management strategies

Demonstrated through multiple use cases

Abstract

Serverless computing is gaining traction as an attractive model for the deployment of a multitude of workloads in the cloud. Designing and building effective resource management solutions for any computing environment requires extensive long term testing, experimentation and analysis of the achieved performance metrics. Utilizing real test beds and serverless platforms for such experimentation work is often times not possible due to resource, time and cost constraints. Thus, employing simulators to model these environments is key to overcoming the challenge of examining the viability of such novel ideas for resource management. Existing simulation software developed for serverless environments lack generalizibility in terms of their architecture as well as the various aspects of resource management, where most are purely focused on modeling function performance under a specific platform architecture. In contrast, we have developed a serverless simulation model with induced flexibility in its architecture as well as the key resource management aspects of function scheduling and scaling. Further, we incorporate techniques for easily deriving monitoring metrics required for evaluating any implemented solutions by users. Our work is presented as CloudSimSC, a modular extension to CloudSim which is a simulator tool extensively used for modeling cloud environments by the research community. We discuss the implemented features in our simulation tool using multiple use cases.