ECOOP 2022
Mon 6 June - Thu 7 July 2022 Berlin, Germany
Thu 9 Jun 2022 13:30 - 13:50 at Aurora Borealis 1 - Language Implementation Chair(s): Guido Salvaneschi

Serverless computing has seen rapid adoption due to its high scalability and flexible, pay-as-you-go billing model. In serverless, developers structure their services as a collection of functions, sporadically invoked by various events like clicks. High inter-arrival time variability of function invocations motivates the providers to start new function instances upon each invocation, leading to significant cold-start delays that degrade user experience. To reduce cold-start latency, the industry has turned to snapshotting, whereby an image of a fully-booted function is stored on disk, enabling a faster invocation compared to booting a function from scratch.

This work introduces vHive, an open-source framework for serverless experimentation with the goal of enabling researchers to study and innovate across the entire serverless stack. Using vHive, we characterize a state-of-the-art snapshot-based serverless infrastructure, based on industry-leading Containerd orchestration framework and Firecracker hypervisor technologies. We find that the execution time of a function started from a snapshot is 95% higher, on average, than when the same function is memory-resident. We show that the high latency is attributable to frequent page faults as the function’s state is brought from disk into guest memory one page at a time. Our analysis further reveals that functions access the same stable working set of pages across different invocations of the same function. By leveraging this insight, we build REAP, a light-weight software mechanism for serverless hosts that records functions’ stable working set of guest memory pages and proactively prefetches it from disk into memory. Compared to baseline snapshotting, REAP slashes the cold-start delays by 3.7x, on average.

Thu 9 Jun

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

13:30 - 15:00
Language ImplementationHub Talks / Research Papers at Aurora Borealis 1
Chair(s): Guido Salvaneschi University of St. Gallen
13:30
20m
Talk
Benchmarking, analysis, and optimization of serverless function snapshotsHub Talk
Hub Talks
Dmitrii Ustiugov ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Plamen Petrov , Marios Kogias Microsoft Research, Edouard Bugnion EPFL, Boris Grot University of Edinburgh, UK
Link to publication DOI
13:50
20m
Talk
Synchron - An API and Runtime for Embedded SystemsECOOP 2022
Research Papers
Abhiroop Sarkar Chalmers University of Technology, Bo Joel Svensson Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, Mary Sheeran Chalmers
Pre-print
14:10
20m
Talk
Functional Programming with DatalogECOOP 2022
Research Papers
André Pacak JGU Mainz, Sebastian Erdweg JGU Mainz
14:30
20m
Talk
Union Types with Disjoint SwitchesArtifacts Evaluated - ReusableArtifacts Evaluated - FunctionalVCOOP 2022ECOOP 2022
Research Papers
Baber Rehman The University of Hong Kong, Xuejing Huang The University of Hong Kong, Ningning Xie University of Toronto, Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira University of Hong Kong