The software architecture world has seen “Serverless” emerge as hot topic in the recent times. Serverless platforms like AWS lambda, Openswhisk, Cloud Functions take away the pain of maintaining fleet of servers for an application by providing a platform to run Functions as a Service(Serverless).
At the core, most platforms use ephemeral containers to run Functions as a Service(FAAS) in one way or other, thereby making horizontal scaling much easier and faster. However, Memory bottlenecks, container state management, function environment setup cost are a few challenges that primarily need to be addressed while setting up a FAAS platform using containers. We set out to explore the performance benchmarks of running Functions as a Service using Docker container, Docker swarm as orchestration engine by creating a simple Serverless platform using Openstack services.
In this talk we discuss fundamental aspects of Serverless execution, our platform’s architecture, performance benchmarks along with the implementation challenges addressed, which will help better understand the kind of applications suitable for FAAS platforms.
