LCS : Alleviating Total Cold Start Latency in Serverless Applications with LRU Warm Container Approach

Abstract

Serverless computing offers "Function-as-a-Service"(FaaS), which promotes an application in the form of independent granular components called functions. FaaS goes well as a widespread standard that facilitates the development of applications in cloud-based environments. Clients can solely focus on developing applications in a serverless ecosystem, passing the overburden of resource governance to the service providers. However, FaaS platforms have to bear the degradation in performance originating from the cold starts of executables i.e. serverless functions. The cold start reflects the delay in provisioning a runtime container that processes the functions. Each serverless platform is handling the problem of cold start with its own solution. In recent times, approaches to deal with cold starts have received the attention of many researchers. This paper comes up with an extensive solution to handle the cold start problem. We propose a scheduling approach to reduce the cold start occurrences by keeping the containers alive for a longer period of time using the Least Recently Used warm Container Selection (LCS ) approach on Affinity-based scheduling. Further, we carried out an evaluation and compared the obtained results with the MRU container selection approach. The proposed LCS approach outperforms by approximately 48% compared to the MRU approach.