Rethinking Deployment for Serverless Functions: A Performance-First Perspective

Serverless computing commonly adopts strong isolation mechanisms for deploying functions, which may bring significant performance overhead because each function needs to run in a completely new environment (i.e., the "one-to-one" model). To accelerate the function computation, prior work has proposed using sandbox sharing to reduce the overhead, i.e., the "many-to-one" model. Nonetheless, either process-based true parallelism or thread-based pseudo-parallelism still causes high latency, preventing its adaptation for latency-sensitive web services.