SEUSS: Rapid serverless deployment using environment snapshots
James Cadden, Thomas A. Unger, Awad, Yara, Han Dong, Orran Krieger, Jonathan Appavoo · OpenBU (Boston University) · 2019
Modern FaaS systems perform well in the case of repeat executions when function working sets stay small. However, these platforms are less effective when applied to more complex, large-scale and dynamic workloads. In this paper, we introduce SEUSS (serverless execution via unikernel snapshot stacks), a new system-level approach for rapidly deploying serverless functions. Through our approach, we demonstrate orders of magnitude improvements in function start times and cacheability, which improves common re-execution paths while also unlocking previously-unsupported large-scale bursty workloads.