New Kids: An Architecture and Performance Investigation of Second-Generation Serverless Platforms

TL;DR

This paper investigates second-generation serverless platforms, highlighting their architectural differences, performance improvements, and limitations through analysis and extensive benchmarking of seven platforms.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of emerging second-generation serverless architectures and evaluates their performance with over 38 million function calls.

Findings

Reduced warm request latency from 40 ms to 10 ms

Cold starts are significantly minimized in second-generation platforms

Analysis of architecture reveals trade-offs between performance and environment limitations

Abstract

With the ever-increasing usage of serverless computing in both industry and academia, it is essential to understand the mechanisms that power the underlying platforms. As serverless is more than ten years old, there are different platforms with vastly different approaches. We show that, next to the traditional and popular platforms, a second generation of serverless platform has emerged. While first-generation platforms are based on containerized, centralized execution, the new generation leverages lightweight isolates and edge deployment. This evolution reduces warm request latency from approximately 40 ms to around 10 ms and reduces cold starts to an afterthought, but limits the execution environment. In this paper, we gather and analyze all publicly available information to provide detailed insights into the underlying architecture of seven platforms and then run a microbenchmark-based evaluation totaling more than 38 million function calls to gain a deeper understanding their performance.