Towards Microsecond-Scale VM Core Provisioning Agility on Serverless Platforms

Bursty, data-intensive serverless workloads, such as server-less big data analytics and DNN inference, amplify the fundamental tension for cloud providers between meeting strict tail-latency service-level objectives (SLOs) and maintaining cost-effectiveness. A key reason is that today's multi-tenant platforms cannot reallocate physical cores between hardware-isolated virtual machines (VMs) at the microsecond speeds these applications require. This capability is critical for instantly responding to demand spikes by shifting resources from low-priority to latency-sensitive tasks.