Evaluation of Network File System as a Shared Data Storage in Serverless Computing

Abstract

Fully-managed cloud and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) services allow the wide adoption of serverless computing for various cloud-native applications. Despite the many advantages that serverless computing provides, no direct connection support exists between function run-times, and it is a barrier for data-intensive applications. To overcome this limitation, the leading cloud computing vendor Amazon Web Services (AWS) has started to support mounting the network file system (NFS) across different function run-times. This paper quantitatively evaluates the performance of accessing NFS storage from multiple function run-times and compares the performance with other methods of sharing data among function run-times. Despite the great qualitative benefits of the approach, the limited I/O bandwidth of NFS storage can become a bottleneck, especially when the number of concurrent access from function run-times increases.