Performance Evaluation of Open-Source Serverless Platforms for Kubernetes

Serverless computing has grown massively in popularity over the last few years, and has provided developers with a way to deploy function-sized code units without having to take care of the actual servers or deal with logging, monitoring, and scaling of their code. High-performance computing (HPC) clusters can profit from improved serverless resource sharing capabilities compared to reservation-based systems such as Slurm. However, before running self-hosted serverless platforms in HPC becomes a viable option, serverless platforms must be able to deliver a decent level of performance. Other researchers have already pointed out that there is a distinct lack of studies in the area of comparative benchmarks on serverless platforms, especially for open-source self-hosted platforms. This study takes a step towards filling this gap by systematically benchmarking two promising self-hosted Kubernetes-based serverless platforms in comparison. While the resulting benchmarks signal potential, they demonstrate that many opportunities for performance improvements in serverless computing are being left on the table.