Serverless computing is becoming increasingly popular due to its ease of programming, fast elasticity, and fine-grained billing. However, the serverless provider still needs to provision, manage, and pay the IaaS provider for the virtual machines (VMs) hosting its platform. This ties the cost of the serverless platform to the cost of the underlying VMs. One way to significantly reduce cost is to use spare resources, which cloud providers rent at a massive discount. Harvest VMs offer such cheap resources: they grow and shrink to harvest all the unallocated CPU cores in their host servers, but may be evicted to make room for more expensive VMs. Thus, using Harvest VMs to run the serverless platform comes with two main challenges that must be carefully managed: VM evictions and dynamically varying resources in each VM.<\/p>\n
In this work, we explore the challenges and benefits of hosting serverless (Function as a Service or simply FaaS) platforms on Harvest VMs. We characterize the serverless workloads and Harvest VMs of Microsoft Azure, and design a serverless load balancer that is aware of evictions and resource variations in Harvest VMs. We modify OpenWhisk, a widely-used open-source serverless platform, to monitor harvested resources and balance the load accordingly, and evaluate it experimentally. Our results show that adopting harvested resources improves efficiency and reduces cost. Under the same cost budget, running serverless platforms on harvested resources achieves 2.2\u00d7 to 9.0\u00d7 higher throughput compared to using dedicated resources. When using the same amount of resources, running serverless platforms on harvested resources achieves 48% to 89% cost savings with lower latency due to better load balancing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Serverless computing is becoming increasingly popular due to its ease of programming, fast elasticity, and fine-grained billing. However, the serverless provider still needs to provision, manage, and pay the IaaS provider for the virtual machines (VMs) hosting its platform. This ties the cost of the serverless platform to the cost of the underlying VMs. One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13547],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[246691],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-780187","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-computer-science"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2021-10-29","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"ACM","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/sosp21-final604.pdf","id":"780193","title":"sosp21-final604","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[{"id":780193,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/sosp21-final604.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Yanqi Zhang","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"\u00cd\u00f1igo Goiri","user_id":32102,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=\u00cd\u00f1igo Goiri"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Gohar Irfan Chaudhry","user_id":38697,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Gohar Irfan Chaudhry"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Rodrigo Fonseca","user_id":40429,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Rodrigo Fonseca"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sameh Elnikety","user_id":33503,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Sameh Elnikety"},{"type":"text","value":"Christina Delimitrou","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Ricardo Bianchini","user_id":33393,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Ricardo Bianchini"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199565],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144927,282170],"msr_project":[658236,616008],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":658236,"post_title":"Serverless Infrastructure","post_name":"serverless-infrastructure","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2020-05-12 09:02:55","post_modified":"2025-02-06 11:16:02","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/serverless-infrastructure\/","post_excerpt":"Function as a Service (FaaS) is a software paradigm that is becoming increasingly popular.\u00a0 Multiple cloud providers offer FaaS as the interface to usage-driven, stateless (serverless) backend services.\u00a0 FaaS offers an intuitive, event-based interface for developing cloud-based applications.\u00a0 In contrast to the traditional cloud interface, in FaaS, users do not explicitly provision or configure virtual machines (VMs) or containers.\u00a0 FaaS users do not pay for resources they do not use either.\u00a0 Instead, users simply upload…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/658236"}]}},{"ID":616008,"post_title":"LEAP: Lean, Efficient, And Predictable Cloud Platforms","post_name":"leap","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2019-10-17 15:35:49","post_modified":"2025-02-05 11:04:40","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/leap\/","post_excerpt":"No public cloud can host large latency-sensitive services, such as search engines, in a way that is economic for those services today! 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