A Fast Cold-Start Solution: Container Space Reuse Based on Resource Isolation

Abstract

With the emergence of cloud-native computing, serverless computing has become a popular way to deploy intensive applications due to its scalability and flexibility, and it has been increasingly applied in the field of big data processing on service platforms. Currently, the development momentum of cloud-native computing is strong, and serverless computing has become more attractive to the growing number of Internet services. However, how to more effectively address the issues of container resource usage and service startup time for serverless computing remains a huge challenge when exploring its potential. Our research is based on the complete life cycle of serverless functions and improves the performance of serverless computing by changing the original method of exchanging space for time or time for space. We focus on how to shorten the cold-start time of serverless computing while maximizing the usage of container resources. The research innovation is the dynamic control of functions and container pools, which mainly includes three aspects. First, we create a container pool with the classification identification based on the usage rate of functions. Then, we use namespace technology to achieve container resource reuse in the security isolated state. Next, we adaptively match the correspondence between functions and reusable container resources through system resource monitoring. Finally, the test results prove that converting the remaining space resources of the container into a prewarm container for new functions can effectively reduce the resource waste caused by idle function-containers, and container resource reuse can further shorten the cold-start time while ensuring the safety and isolation of functions. Compared to other open-source serverless platforms, our solution can reduce the cold-start time of general function calls to less than 20 ms and improve the ability to alleviate cold starts by 90% without enabling container prewarming.