On merits and viability of multi-cloud serverless

Abstract

Serverless computing is a rapidly growing paradigm in the cloud industry that envisions functions as the computational building blocks of an application. Instead of forcing the application developer to provision cloud resources for their application, the cloud provider provisions the required resources for each function "under the hood."In this work, we envision virtual serverless providers (VSPs) to aggregate serverless offerings. In doing so, VSPs allow developers (and businesses) to get rid of vendor lock-in problems and exploit pricing and performance variation across providers by adaptively utilizing the best provider at each time, forcing the providers to compete to offer cheaper and superior services. We discuss the merits of a VSP and show that serverless systems are well-suited to cross-provider aggregation, compared to virtual machines. We propose a VSP system architecture and implement an initial version. Using experimental evaluations, our preliminary results show that a VSP can improve maximum sustained throughput by 1.2x to 4.2x, reduces SLO violations by 98.8%, and improves the total invocations' costs by 54%.