Tackling Cold Start in Serverless Computing with Container Runtime Reusing
Kun Suo, Yong Shi, Xiaohua Xu, Dazhao Cheng, Wei Chen · 2020
During past few years, serverless computing has changed the paradigm of application development and deployment in the cloud and edge due to its unique advantages, including easy administration, automatic scaling, built-in fault tolerance, etc. Nevertheless, serverless computing is also facing challenges such as long latency due to the cold start. In this paper, we propose HotC, a container-based runtime management framework which leverages the lightweight containers to mitigate the cold start and improve network performance of serverless applications. HotC maintains a live container runtime pool, analyzes the user input or configuration file, and provides available runtime for immediate reuse. Our evaluation results show that HotC introduces negligible overhead and can efficiently improve performance of various applications in both cloud servers and edge devices.