Proportional Fairness and Isolation for Serverless Applications over FaaS Platforms

Effectively supporting multi-tenant application deployments in the emerging Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) (or serverless computing) model requires extending it with fairness and isolation mechanisms. Quality-of-service (QoS) concepts developed over time in the networking, storage, and virtualized infrastructure domains are currently being investigated in the space of serverless platforms. In this paper, we propose a two-level serverless QoS architecture that combines state-of-the-art scheduling algorithms and mechanisms with the unique characteristics of distributed serverless platforms, resulting into a system that provides proportional fairness for serverless applications with shared access to distributed and load-balanced FaaS platforms. The primary advantage of our approach is the use of higher-level scheduling mechanisms only, avoiding the need to manage low-level resources within underlying FaaS platforms (thus not requiring changes to them) for achieving fairness. We demonstrate the concrete benefits of our architecture using state-of-the-art benchmarks in experiments over AWS EC2.