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Since the appearance of Amazon Lambda in 2014, all major cloud providers have embraced the "Function as a Service" (FaaS) model, because of its enormous potential for a wide variety of applications. As expected (and also desired), the competition is fierce in the serverless world, and includes aspects such as the run-time support for the orchestration of serverless functions. In this regard, the three major production services are currently Amazon Step Functions (December 2016), Azure Durable Functions (June 2017), and IBM Composer (October 2017), still young and experimental projects with a long way ahead. In this article, we will compare and analyze these three serverless orchestration systems under a common evaluation framework. We will study their architectures, programming and billing models, and their effective support for parallel execution, among others. Through a series of experiments, we will also evaluate the run-time overhead of the different infrastructures for different types of workflows.

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Serverless computing is an emerging paradigm that greatly simplifies the usage of cloud resources and suits well to many tasks. Most notably, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) enables programmers to develop cloud applications as individual functions that can run and scale independently. Yet, due to the disaggregation of storage and compute resources in FaaS, applications that require fine-grained support for mutable state and synchronization, such as machine learning and scientific computing, are hard to build.In this work, we present Crucial, a system to program highly-concurrent stateful applications with serverless architectures. Its programming model keeps the simplicity of FaaS and allows to port effortlessly multi-threaded algorithms to this new environment. Crucial is built upon the key insight that FaaS resembles to concurrent programming at the scale of a data center. As a consequence, a distributed shared memory layer is the right answer to the need for fine-grained state management and coordination in serverless. We validate our system with the help of micro-benchmarks and various applications. In particular, we implement two common machine learning algorithms: 𝑘-means clustering and logistic regression. For both cases, Crucial obtains superior or comparable performance to an equivalent Spark cluster.

Serverless computing greatly simplifies the use of cloud resources. In particular, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms enable programmers to develop applications as individual functions that can run and scale independently. Unfortunately, applications that require fine-grained support for mutable state and synchronization, such as machine learning (ML) and scientific computing, are notoriously hard to build with this new paradigm. In this work, we aim at bridging this gap. We present Crucial , a system to program highly-parallel stateful serverless applications. Crucial retains the simplicity of serverless computing. It is built upon the key insight that FaaS resembles to concurrent programming at the scale of a datacenter. Accordingly, a distributed shared memory layer is the natural answer to the needs for fine-grained state management and synchronization. Crucial allows to port effortlessly a multi-threaded code base to serverless, where it can benefit from the scalability and pay-per-use model of FaaS platforms. We validate Crucial with the help of micro-benchmarks and by considering various stateful applications. Beyond classical parallel tasks (e.g., a Monte Carlo simulation), these applications include representative ML algorithms such as k -means and logistic regression. Our evaluation shows that Crucial obtains superior or comparable performance to Apache Spark at similar cost (18%–40% faster). We also use Crucial to port (part of) a state-of-the-art multi-threaded ML library to serverless. The ported application is up to 30% faster than with a dedicated high-end server. Finally, we attest that Crucial can rival in performance with a single-machine, multi-threaded implementation of a complex coordination problem. Overall, Crucial delivers all these benefits with less than 6% of changes in the code bases of the evaluated applications.