Fireworks: A Fast, Efficient and Safe Serverless Framework

Serverless computing is a new paradigm, and it is becoming rapidly popular in Cloud computing. Serverless computing has interesting, unique properties that the unit of deployment and execution is a serverless function. Moreover, it introduces the new economic model pay-as-you-go billing model. It provides a high economic benefit from highly elastic resource provisioning to the application. However, it also accompanies the new challenges for serverless computing: (1) start-up time latency problem from relatively short function execution time, (2) high-security risk from highly consolidated environment, and (3) memory efficiency problem from unpredictable function invocations. These problems not only degrade performance but also lowers the economic benefits of Cloud providers. In this work, we propose VM-level pre-JIT snapshot and develop Fireworks to solve the three main challenges without any compromises. The key idea behind the VM-level preJIT snapshot is to leverage pre-JITted serverless function codes to reduce both start-up time and execution time of the function and improve memory efficiency by sharing the pre-JITted codes. Also, Fireworks can provide high-level isolation by storing the pre-JITted codes to the snapshot of microVM's snapshot. Our evaluation shows that Fireworks outperforms the state-of-art serverless platforms by 20.6× and memory efficiency up to 7.3×.