Open-source Serverless Architectures: an Evaluation of Apache OpenWhisk

The serverless computing paradigm ushers in new concepts for running applications and services in the cloud. Currently, commercial solutions dominate the market, though open-source solutions do exist. As a consequence of this, there is little research detailing how well the different open-source solutions perform. In this paper, one such open-source solution, Apache OpenWhisk, is investigated to shed light on the capabilities and limitations inherent of such serverless computing architecture, and principally to provide further research on this particular solution’s performance. This is accomplished through an extensive evaluation of OpenWhisk, involving a variety of experiments and benchmarks.