In Serverless, OS Scheduler Choice Costs Money: A Hybrid Scheduling Approach for Cheaper FaaS

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhao, Yuxuan, Weng, Weikang, van Nieuwpoort, Rob, Uta, Alexandru
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhao, Yuxuan
Weng, Weikang
van Nieuwpoort, Rob
Uta, Alexandru
author_facet Zhao, Yuxuan
Weng, Weikang
van Nieuwpoort, Rob
Uta, Alexandru
contents In Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) serverless, large applications are split into short-lived stateless functions. Deploying functions is mutually profitable: users need not be concerned with resource management, while providers can keep their servers at high utilization rates running thousands of functions concurrently on a single machine. It is exactly this high concurrency that comes at a cost. The standard Linux Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) switches often between tasks, which leads to prolonged execution times. We present evidence that relying on the default Linux CFS scheduler increases serverless workloads cost by up to 10X. In this article, we raise awareness and make a case for rethinking the OS-level scheduling in Linux for serverless workloads composed of many short-lived processes. To make serverless more affordable we introduce a hybrid two-level scheduling approach that relies on FaaS characteristics. Short-running functions are executed in FIFO fashion without preemption, while longer-running functions are passed to CFS after a certain time period. We show that tailor-made OS scheduling is able to significantly reduce user-facing costs without adding any provider-facing overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_08448
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle In Serverless, OS Scheduler Choice Costs Money: A Hybrid Scheduling Approach for Cheaper FaaS
Zhao, Yuxuan
Weng, Weikang
van Nieuwpoort, Rob
Uta, Alexandru
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
In Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) serverless, large applications are split into short-lived stateless functions. Deploying functions is mutually profitable: users need not be concerned with resource management, while providers can keep their servers at high utilization rates running thousands of functions concurrently on a single machine. It is exactly this high concurrency that comes at a cost. The standard Linux Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) switches often between tasks, which leads to prolonged execution times. We present evidence that relying on the default Linux CFS scheduler increases serverless workloads cost by up to 10X. In this article, we raise awareness and make a case for rethinking the OS-level scheduling in Linux for serverless workloads composed of many short-lived processes. To make serverless more affordable we introduce a hybrid two-level scheduling approach that relies on FaaS characteristics. Short-running functions are executed in FIFO fashion without preemption, while longer-running functions are passed to CFS after a certain time period. We show that tailor-made OS scheduling is able to significantly reduce user-facing costs without adding any provider-facing overhead.
title In Serverless, OS Scheduler Choice Costs Money: A Hybrid Scheduling Approach for Cheaper FaaS
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08448