FaaS provides many benefits to the end-users, such as zero maintenance and on-demand auto-scaling. As each new technology brings benefits, it brings challenges. There are two major challenges: cold start latency and autoscaling speed in response to bursty traffic. Cold start latency refers to the time it takes to create a new function instance and get it ready to start execution. Autoscaling refers to the operation of automatically adjusting the number of running function instances to meet the traffic demand. This talk provides a detailed analysis of what causes the cold start latency and the autoscaling bottleneck. It then presents a new approach that reduces the cold start latency through instantiating a new function instance from a combination of its memory snapshot and its essential code chunks. The authors will share their learnings and test results. On the autoscaling part, the authors will share their insight of using an elastic function sandbox to boost the auto-scaling speed.
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