Imaginary Machines: A Serverless Model for Cloud Applications

TL;DR

Imaginary Machines introduces a serverless model that enables traditional cloud applications to leverage elastic resources and eliminate runtime orchestration, improving resource utilization and reducing management costs.

Contribution

It presents a novel serverless model that exposes elastic resources as a network-of-hosts and manages resources transparently, allowing unmodified cloud applications to become serverless.

Findings

Enables unmodified cloud applications to operate as serverless.

Improves resource utilization for cloud applications.

Reduces management complexity and costs.

Abstract

Serverless Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms provide applications with resources that are highly elastic, quick to instantiate, accounted at fine granularity, and without the need for explicit runtime resource orchestration. This combination of the core properties underpins the success and popularity of the serverless FaaS paradigm. However, these benefits are not available to most cloud applications because they are designed for networked virtual machines/containers environments. Since such cloud applications cannot take advantage of the highly elastic resources of serverless and require run-time orchestration systems to operate, they suffer from lower resource utilization, additional management complexity, and costs relative to their FaaS serverless counterparts. We propose Imaginary Machines, a new serverless model for cloud applications. This model (1.) exposes the highly elastic resources of serverless platforms as the traditional network-of-hosts model that cloud applications expect, and (2.) it eliminates the need for explicit run-time orchestration by transparently managing application resources based on signals generated during cloud application executions. With the Imaginary Machines model, unmodified cloud applications become serverless applications. While still based on the network-of-host model, they benefit from the highly elastic resources and do not require runtime orchestration, just like their specialized serverless FaaS counterparts, promising increased resource utilization while reducing management costs.