Melding the Serverless Control Plane with the Conventional Cluster Manager for Speed and Resource Efficiency
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866908748883165184 |
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| author | Kondrashov, Leonid Cvetković, Lazar Wang, Hancheng Zhou, Boxi Ustiugov, Dmitrii |
| author_facet | Kondrashov, Leonid Cvetković, Lazar Wang, Hancheng Zhou, Boxi Ustiugov, Dmitrii |
| contents | Serverless platforms face a trade-off: conventional cluster managers like Kubernetes offer compatibility for co-locating Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) components of serverless applications, at the cost of high cold-start latency, whereas specialized FaaS-only systems like Dirigent achieve low latency by sacrificing compatibility, preventing integrated management and optimization. Our analysis reveals that FaaS traffic is bimodal: predictable, sustainable traffic consumes >98% of cluster resources, whereas sporadic, excessive bursts stress the control plane's scaling latency, not its throughput.
With these insights, we design PulseNet, a serverless architecture that uses a dual-track control plane tailored to both traffic types. PulseNet's standard track manages sustainable traffic with long-lived, full-featured Regular Instances under a conventional cluster manager, preserving compatibility for the majority of the workload. To handle excessive traffic, an expedited track bypasses the slow manager to rapidly create short-lived, disposable Emergency Instances, minimizing cold-start latency and resource waste from idle instances. This hybrid approach achieves 35% better performance than Dirigent, a FaaS-only system, on a production workload at the same cost and outperforms other Kubernetes-compatible systems by 1.5-3.5x, reducing the cost by up to 70%. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_24551 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Melding the Serverless Control Plane with the Conventional Cluster Manager for Speed and Resource Efficiency Kondrashov, Leonid Cvetković, Lazar Wang, Hancheng Zhou, Boxi Ustiugov, Dmitrii Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 68 D.4.4 Serverless platforms face a trade-off: conventional cluster managers like Kubernetes offer compatibility for co-locating Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) components of serverless applications, at the cost of high cold-start latency, whereas specialized FaaS-only systems like Dirigent achieve low latency by sacrificing compatibility, preventing integrated management and optimization. Our analysis reveals that FaaS traffic is bimodal: predictable, sustainable traffic consumes >98% of cluster resources, whereas sporadic, excessive bursts stress the control plane's scaling latency, not its throughput. With these insights, we design PulseNet, a serverless architecture that uses a dual-track control plane tailored to both traffic types. PulseNet's standard track manages sustainable traffic with long-lived, full-featured Regular Instances under a conventional cluster manager, preserving compatibility for the majority of the workload. To handle excessive traffic, an expedited track bypasses the slow manager to rapidly create short-lived, disposable Emergency Instances, minimizing cold-start latency and resource waste from idle instances. This hybrid approach achieves 35% better performance than Dirigent, a FaaS-only system, on a production workload at the same cost and outperforms other Kubernetes-compatible systems by 1.5-3.5x, reducing the cost by up to 70%. |
| title | Melding the Serverless Control Plane with the Conventional Cluster Manager for Speed and Resource Efficiency |
| topic | Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 68 D.4.4 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24551 |