MAFF: Self-adaptive Memory Optimization for Serverless Functions

Abstract

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), a key enabler of serverless computing, has been proliferating, as it offers a cheap alternative for application development and deployment. However, while offering many advantages, FaaS also poses new challenges. In particular, most commercial FaaS providers still require users to manually configure the memory allocated to the FaaS functions based on their experience and knowledge. This often leads to suboptimal function performance and higher execution costs. In this paper, we present a framework called MAFF that automatically finds the optimal memory configurations for the FaaS functions based on two optimization objectives: cost-only and balanced (balance between cost and execution duration). Furthermore, MAFF self-adapts the memory configurations for the FaaS functions based on the changing function inputs or other requirements, such as an increase in the number of requests. Moreover, we propose and implement different optimization algorithms for different objectives. We demonstrate the functionality of MAFF on AWS Lambda by testing on four different categories of FaaS functions. Our results show that the suggested memory configurations with the Linear algorithm achieve 90% accuracy with a speedup of 2x compared to the other algorithms. Finally, we compare MAFF with two popular memory optimization tools provided by AWS, i.e., AWS Compute Optimizer and AWS Lambda Power Tuning, and demonstrate how our framework overcomes their limitations.

Publication
9th European Conference On Service-Oriented And Cloud Computing (ESOCC) 2022
AJindal
AJindal
SRE

My research interests include cloud computing, specifically focussing on serverless computing for heterogeneous systems, edge computing, and AIOps.

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