Evaluation of language runtimes in open-source serverless platforms

Abstract

Serverless computing is revolutionising cloud application development as it offers the ability to create modular, highly-scalable, fault-tolerant applications, with minimal operational management. In order to contribute to its widespread adoption of serverless platforms, the design and performance of language runtimes that are available in Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) serverless platforms is key. This paper aims to investigate the performance impact of language runtimes in open-source serverless platforms, deployable on local clusters. A suite of experiments is developed and deployed on two selected platforms: OpenWhisk and Fission. The results show a clear distinction between compiled and dynamic languages in cold starts but a pretty close overall performance in warm starts. Comparisons with similar evaluations for commercial platforms reveal that warm start performance is competitive for certain languages, while cold starts are lagging behind by a wide margin. Overall, the evaluation yielded usable results in regards to preferable choice of language runtime for each platform