Memento: Architectural Support for Ephemeral Memory Management in Serverless Environments
Ziqi Wang, Kaiyang Zhao, Pei Li, Andrew Jacob, Michael A. Kozuch, Todd C. Mowry, Dimitrios Skarlatos · 2023
Serverless computing is an increasingly attractive paradigm in the cloud due to its ease of use and fine-grained pay-for-what-you-use billing. However, serverless computing poses new challenges to system design due to its short-lived function execution model. Our detailed analysis reveals that memory management is responsible for a major amount of function execution cycles. This is because functions pay the full critical-path costs of memory management in both userspace and the operating system without the opportunity to amortize these costs over their short lifetimes.