The SPEC-RG Reference Architecture for FaaS: From Microservices and Containers to Serverless Platforms

Abstract

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Serverless Applications: Why, When, and How?

“…Having concrete information on these topics would be valuable for managers to guide decisions on whether a serverless application can be a suitable solution for a specific use case. The SPEC-RG Cloud group suggests that surveys of real-world serverless computing are needed to understand architectural, implementation, and deployment patterns emerging in the "serverless soup" [12]. Leitner et al also discuss that empirical studies about serverless use are required to guide software developers with building serverless solutions [6].…”

Prebaking Functions to Warm the Serverless Cold Start

“…Function execution sequence when a function replica is not available. Adapted from [7] the faster it is to recover the state just before the failure (because less computation must be re-executed). On the other hand, since the snapshot generation competes for computing resources, frequent snapshots could slow the application down.…”

“…To spin off a prebaked function, we need to create a template that adds all CRIU dependencies and executes CRIU commands. As CRIU uses different commands to start processes in different runtimes, we created a new CRIU-version template for each language that we wanted to support 7 . With the prebaking template, the developers can create function projects that adopts the prebaking technique by using the new operation from FaaS-CLI.…”

“…Although all the major FaaS providers share above basic principles, the design of their platforms is very diverse; maybe a sign of a still-nascent field. Nevertheless, there are already some common, emerging, architectural patterns, as identified by the SPEC Research Group on Cloud [7]. We based our background overview on the SPEC-RG reference architecture.…”

“…The Figure shows, The function building process starts when the Function Builder component receives the function source code and transforms it into a deployable artifact. After the building phase, the deployable function is stored into the Function Registry (from where later it can be downloaded and used to create a Function Replica [7]).…”