Searching for the Server in Serverless

Function as a Service (FaaS) products like AWS Lambda are more popular than ever. How do we measure and design for performance and learn more about how these services are built?

Presented at dotScale Paris 4/24/17.

Transcript

1. Searching for the Server in Serverless @smithclay New Relic dotScale April 24, 2017
2. λ HTTP Requests Client App Simple App Architecture with FaaS Functions + API Gateway Is this going to (not) work for me? Managed Infrastructure λ λ λ
3. Event Trigger 1. Invoke λ 2. Run 3. End Result Error Timeout or or
4. FaaS: Typical Metrics Error Count Function Invocation Count Function Duration (ms)
5. Cold Start vs Warm Start Event Trigger Handler Warm Function Invocation Time Create Initialize Handler Cold
6. λ Running Commands const exec = require('child_process').exec; exports.handler = (trigger, cb) => { exec('whoami', (err, stdout) => { console.log(stdout); return cb(null); }); } [LOG TIME] sbxuser_1066
7. λ Discovery v2 with SSH Server λ ssh process
8. Info from /proc 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2666 v3 @ 2.90GHz cat /proc/cpuinfo 3857664 kB cat /proc/meminfo ixgbevf (EC2 10Gbps Network Driver) cat /proc/modules c4.large EC2 Compute-Optimized Instance (?)
9. c4.large instance λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λs on a VM 10 Gbps λ = 128 MB Function λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ λ
10. Cold Start Discovery in Code var SO_SO_COLD = true; exports.handler = function(trigger, cb) { console.log('Cold? %s', SO_SO_COLD); SO_SO_COLD = false; return callback(cb) } https://github.com/smithclay/lambda-proc-info
11. Warming methodology Scheduled Event λ Only effective for non- concurrent execution! 4 minute interval
12. Cold starts, visually ~7 hrs ~8 hrs
13. λ Host Hopping 10.13 10.12 10.11 10.13 10.12 10.12 10.12 10. 11 # of AZs in us-west-2: 3
14. Design Your Own FAAS High availability (multi-AZ or region) Elastic VMs and Automagic Freezing Containers Really good scheduling algorithm
15. FaaS: No Silver Bullet "I've got a quick, computationally-intensive task that I need to perform occasionally in response to a well-defined event that isn't that sensitive to latency." —The Ideal FaaS Developer // TO DO: measure && share
16. Thanks. @smithclay New Relic dotScale April 24, 2017