MicroFaaS: Energy-efficient Serverless on Bare-metal Single-board Computers
Anthony Byrne1,a, Yanni Pang1,b, Allen Zou1,c, Shripad Nadgowda2 and Ayse K. Coskun1,d
1Boston University, Boston, MA 02215
aabyrne19@bu.edu
byanni@bu.edu
callenzou@bu.edu
dacoskun@bu.edu
2IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
nadgowda@us.ibm.com
ABSTRACT
Serverless function-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms offer a radically-new paradigm for cloud software development, yet the hardware infrastructure underlying these platforms is based on a decades-old design pattern. The rise of FaaS presents an opportunity to reimagine cloud infrastructure to be more energyefficient, cost-effective, reliable, and secure. In this paper, we show how replacing handfuls of x86-based rack servers with hundreds of ARM-based single-board computers could lead to a virtualizationfree, energy-proportional cloud that achieves this vision. We call our systematically-designed implementation MicroFaaS, and we conduct a thorough evaluation and cost analysis comparing MicroFaaS to a throughput-matched FaaS platform implemented in the style of conventional virtualization-based cloud systems. Our results show a 5.6x increase in energy efficiency and 34.2% decrease in total cost of ownership compared to our baseline.
Keywords: Serverless Infrastructure, Bare Metal, Function-Asa- Service, Single-Board Computers, Energy-Proportional Computing.
