Enhancing Automated FaaS with Cost-aware Provisioning of Cloud Resources

Abstract

Compute resources are becoming more diverse, more specialized, and more physically distributed every day. To properly use these resources, the new paradigm of serverless computing aims to abstract away the complexity associated with resource configuration and workload deployment. Building on this serverless architecture are efforts for automated resource selection and automated task distribution and coordination. As computing resources advance, so too does application-specific optimizations, as is the case of deep learning on GPUs or even the more specialized TPUs. To better navigate the efficient and effective use of these diverse resources, we present the addition of automated, cost-aware provisioning of cloud resources to a state-of-the-art automated serverless framework. By automating the selection, provisioning, and configuration of cloud resources, our framework, which we call DELTA+, will enable truly cost-aware usage of the cloud by navigating complex computational tradeoffs. In this proposal, we will outline how we plan to introduce burstable cloud computing to automated serverless infrastructure and to present our initial findings with respect to system design and performance.