Memoryless: A Two-phase Methodology for Setting Memory Requirements on Serverless Applications

Rodrigo Righi, Gabriel Borges, Cristiano André da Costa, Vinicius Rodrigues

2021

Abstract

Serverless computing, also known as Function as a Service, is a new paradigm that aims to separate the user of the platform from details about any infrastructure deployment. The problem lies in the fact that all the current Serverless platforms require the user to specify at least the needed memory usage for their Serverless offerings. Here we have a paradox since the users must be involved in technical issues to run their applications efficiently, both in terms of execution time and financial costs. To the best of our knowledge, the state-of-the-art lacks on providing studies regarding the best memory size for a particular application setting. In this context, this work presents Memoryless, a computational methodology that is in charge of removing the completion of memory limits by the user when launching Serverless demands. To accomplish this, we introduce in the literature a two-pass algorithm composed of a microbenchmark where users inform simple application parameters (first pass) and receive from the hypervisor the memory required to run their demands. In addition to user abstraction, financial cost also drives our research, since commonly this metric is directly proportional to the selected memory size. We implemented Memoryless using NodeJS, Kubeless, and Kubernetes. The result confirms that the proposed methodology is capable of lowering the memory needs to run an application while maintaining expected execution times. This benefits both cloud administrators (who can run more Serverless demands for different users in parallel) and cloud users, who will pay less on using the cloud, so exploring better the pay-as-you-go policy.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Righi R., Borges G., André da Costa C. and Rodrigues V. (2021). Memoryless: A Two-phase Methodology for Setting Memory Requirements on Serverless Applications. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-758-536-4, pages 84-94. DOI: 10.5220/0010707500003058

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist21,
author={Rodrigo Righi and Gabriel Borges and Cristiano André da Costa and Vinicius Rodrigues},
title={Memoryless: A Two-phase Methodology for Setting Memory Requirements on Serverless Applications},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,},
year={2021},
pages={84-94},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010707500003058},
isbn={978-989-758-536-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,
TI - Memoryless: A Two-phase Methodology for Setting Memory Requirements on Serverless Applications
SN - 978-989-758-536-4
AU - Righi R.
AU - Borges G.
AU - André da Costa C.
AU - Rodrigues V.
PY - 2021
SP - 84
EP - 94
DO - 10.5220/0010707500003058