SeMoDe – Simulation and Benchmarking Pipeline for Function as a Service

Cloud computing started with the promise of delivering computing resources elastically at scale, pay per use and on demand self-service to name a few capabilities. In early 2016, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched a new product called AWS Lambda which started the so called serverless hype and established a new cloud delivery model, namely Function as a Service (FaaS). FaaS offerings keep the promise of delivering computing resources on demand. They dynamically scale up and down function instances and introduce the most fine-grained billing model across all as-a-service offerings by accounting on a milliseconds basis. Despite this flexibility and the possibility to concentrate on the business functionality, a FaaS user loses operational control. Only a few configuration options remain to tune the functions. The first pay-as-you-go billing model raises new questions for performance-cost trade-offs.
In order to choose a suitable configuration dependent on the use case and get a solid understanding of performance impact of FaaS platforms, SeMoDe implements a benchmarking and simulation pipeline. It calibrates a physical developer machine, simulates the function in different settings which are comparable to those of cloud offerings and enables a decision guidance to choose an appropriate configuration when deploying it. Based on a Structured Literature Review (SLR) to show the benchmarking and simulation efforts, I suggest a checklist for conducting fair, repeatable and meaningful benchmarks with a focus on documenting the experiments.