KUBEDIRECT: Unleashing the Full Power of the Cluster Manager for Serverless Computing
Sheng Qi, Zhiquan Zhang, Xuanzhe Liu, Xin Jin

TL;DR
KUBEDIRECT enhances Kubernetes for serverless computing by bypassing API bottlenecks, enabling direct message passing, and maintaining compatibility, resulting in significantly reduced latency and high performance.
Contribution
It introduces a novel state management scheme leveraging Kubernetes' narrow waist to improve efficiency without sacrificing compatibility.
Findings
Reduces serving latency by 26.7x compared to Knative
Achieves performance comparable to Dirigent
Adds minimal code (~150 LoC) per controller
Abstract
FaaS platforms rely on cluster managers like Kubernetes for resource management. Kubernetes is popular due to its state-centric APIs that decouple the control plane into modular controllers. However, to scale out a burst of FaaS instances, message passing becomes the primary bottleneck as controllers have to exchange extensive state through the API Server. Existing solutions opt for a clean-slate redesign of cluster managers, but at the expense of compatibility with existing ecosystem and substantial engineering effort. We present KUBEDIRECT, a Kubernetes-based cluster manager for FaaS. We find that there exists a common narrow waist across FaaS platform that allows us to achieve both efficiency and external compatibility. Our insight is that the sequential structure of the narrow waist obviates the need for a single source of truth, allowing us to bypass the API Server and perform…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCloud Computing and Resource Management · Software System Performance and Reliability · Distributed systems and fault tolerance
