A Declarative Approach to Topology-Aware Serverless Function-Execution Scheduling

Abstract

State-of-the-art serverless platforms use hard-coded scheduling policies that are unaware of the possible topological constraints of functions. Considering these constraints when scheduling functions leads to sensible performance improvements, e.g., minimising loading times or data-access latencies. This issue becomes more pressing when considered in the emerging multi-cloud and edge-cloud-continuum systems, where only specific nodes can access specialised, local resources. To address this problem, we present a declarative language for defining serverless scheduling policies to express constraints on topologies of schedulers and execution nodes. We implement our approach as an extension of the OpenWhisk platform.