Dirigent: Lightweight Serverless Orchestration
Lazar Cvetkovi\'c, Fran\c{c}ois Costa, Mihajlo Djokic, Michal, Friedman, Ana Klimovic

TL;DR
Dirigent is a novel lightweight FaaS orchestration system that significantly reduces scheduling latency and increases sandbox deployment throughput by redesigning cluster management principles.
Contribution
It introduces a new architecture for FaaS orchestration that eliminates critical path state updates and simplifies internal abstractions, outperforming existing systems.
Findings
Reduces 99th percentile scheduling latency by 2.79x compared to AWS Lambda.
Spins up 2500 sandboxes per second at low latency, 1250x more than Knative.
Achieves efficient FaaS orchestration with minimal internal communication overhead.
Abstract
While Function as a Service (FaaS) platforms can initialize function sandboxes on worker nodes in 10-100s of milliseconds, the latency to schedule functions in real FaaS clusters can be orders of magnitude higher. The current approach of building FaaS cluster managers on top of legacy orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes) leads to high scheduling delays when clusters experience high sandbox churn, which is common for FaaS. Generic cluster managers use many hierarchical abstractions and internal components to manage and reconcile cluster state with frequent persistent updates. This becomes a bottleneck for FaaS since the cluster state frequently changes as sandboxes are created on the critical path of requests. Based on our root cause analysis of performance issues in existing FaaS cluster managers, we propose Dirigent, a clean-slate system architecture for FaaS orchestration with…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsModular Robots and Swarm Intelligence
