WLEC: A Not So Cold Architecture to Mitigate Cold Start Problem in Serverless Computing

Abstract

As serverless computing gains popularity among developers for its low costing and elasticity, it has emerged as a promising research field in computer science. Despite its popularity, the cold start remains an issue that needs more attention. In this paper, we address the cold start problem of the serverless platform. We propose WLEC, a container management architecture to minimize the cold start time. WLEC uses a modified S2LRU structure, called S2LRU ++ with an additional third queue. We implement WLEC in OpenLambda and evaluate it in both AWS and Local VM environment with six different metrics in addition to one real-time image resizing application. Among improvements in all metrics, 50% less memory consumption compared to the all-warm method and 31% average cold start duration reduction compared to the no-warm method are the most notable ones.