Cloud Function Performance: a component modeling approach

Abstract

Cloud Functions are a trend in cloud computing in which developers are allowed to install code in a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform able to manage provisioning, execution, monitoring and automatic scaling. The underlying infrastructure in FaaS platforms is hidden from the developers and designers and, since the inuence of the infrastructure is unknown, this makes it di_cult to apply software performance engineering approaches on cloud functions, which could lead to wrong or inaccurate performance estimations. In this study, we explore the use of component-based modeling and simulation in order to generate performance estimations of an exemplar cloud function which was exercised using a variety of workloads. A cloud function was both implemented and instrumented to record performance datain a log _le, associated with its invocations; using the log _le as an input, we extracted a performance model in a Palladio Component Model format suitable for running simulations to validate whether the generated model could explain the runtime behavior of the function. Using this approach and further tunings in the model, we were able to validate that the simulations could explain more than 95% of the function's behavior and that component-based modeling and simulation can be considered a serious option when trying to explain the behavior of a cloud function.

Keywords

• Software Performance Engineering
• Model-driven Software Engineering
• Function-as-a-Service
• Cloud Computing
• Cloud Functions