Locality-aware Load-Balancing For Serverless Clusters

Abstract

While serverless computing provides more convenient abstractions for developing and deploying applications, the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) programming model presents new resource management challenges for the FaaS provider. In this paper, we investigate load-balancing policies for serverless clusters. Locality, i.e., running repeated invocations of a function on the same server, is a key determinant of performance because it increases warm-starts and reduces cold-start overheads. We find that the locality vs. load tradeoff is crucial and presents a large design space.