Real-time Serverless: Enabling Application Performance Guarantees

Today's serverless provides "function-as-a-service" with dynamic scaling and fine-grained resource charging, enabling new cloud applications. Serverless functions are invoked as a best-effort service. We propose an extension to serverless, called real-time serverless that provides an invocation rate guarantee, a service-level objective (SLO) specified by the application, and delivered by the underlying implementation. Real-time serverless allows applications to guarantee real-time performance. We study real-time serverless behavior analytically and empirically to characterize its ability to support bursty, real-time cloud and edge applications efficiently. Finally, we use a case study, traffic monitoring, to illustrate the use and benefits of real-time serverless, on our prototype implementation.