Title
FlashCube: Fast Provisioning of Serverless Functions with Streamlined Container Runtimes
Abstract
ABSTRACTFast provisioning of serverless functions is salient for serverless platforms. Though lightweight sandboxes (e.g., containers) enclose only necessary files and libraries, a cold launch still requires up to a few seconds to complete. Such slow provisioning prolongs the response time of serverless functions and negatively impacts users' experiences. This paper analyzes the main reasons for such slowdown and introduces an effective containerization framework, FlashCube. Instead of building a container from scratch, FlashCube quickly and efficiently assembles it through a group of pre-created general container parts (e.g., namespaces, cgroups, and language runtimes). In addition, FlashCube's user-space implementation makes it easily applicable to existing commodity serverless platforms. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrates that FlashCube can quickly provision containerized functions in less than 10 ms (vs. ~400 ms using Docker containers).
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3477113.3487273
SOSP
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhen Lin100.34
Kao-Feng Hsieh200.34
Yu Sun300.68
Seunghee Shin411.02
Hui Lu501.01