Supporting Multi-Cloud in Serverless Computing

Abstract

Serverless computing is a widely adopted cloud execution model composed of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) offerings. The increased level of abstraction makes vendor lock-in inherent to serverless computing, raising more concerns than previous cloud paradigms. Multicloud serverless is a promising emerging approach against vendor lock-in, yet multiple challenges must be overcome to tap its potential. First, we need to be aware of both the performance and cost of each FaaS provider. Second, a multi-cloud architecture needs to be proposed before deploying a multi-cloud workflow. Domain-specific serverless offerings must then be integrated into the multi-cloud architecture to improve performance and/or save costs. Finally, we require workload portability support for serverless multi-cloud. In this paper, we present a multi-cloud library for crossserverless offerings. We develop an analysis system to support comparison among public FaaS providers in terms of performance and cost. Moreover, we present how to alleviate data gravity with domain-specific serverless offerings. Finally, we deploy workloads on these architectures to evaluate several public FaaS offerings.