2025/05/30 by Leonid Kondrashov, Lazar Cvetković, Kondrashov, Leonid +8 · 1 citation
Engineering · #68 #Advanced Data Processing Techniques #D.4.4 #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.24551
openalex publication_date 2025/05/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Serverless platforms face a trade-off: conventional cluster managers like Kubernetes offer compatibility for co-locating Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) components of serverless applications, at the cost of high cold-start latency, whereas specialized FaaS-only systems like Dirigent achieve low latency by sacrificing compatibility, preventing integrated management and optimization. Our analysis reveals that FaaS traffic is bimodal: predictable, sustainable traffic consumes >98% of cluster resources, whereas sporadic, excessive bursts stress the control plane's scaling latency, not its throughput. With these insights, we design PulseNet, a serverless architecture that uses a dual-track control plane tailored to both traffic types. PulseNet's standard track manages sustainable traffic with long-lived, full-featured Regular Instances under a conventional cluster manager, preserving compatibility for the majority of the workload. To handle excessive traffic, an expedited track bypasses the slow manager to rapidly create short-lived, disposable Emergency Instances, minimizing cold-start latency and resource waste from idle instances. This hybrid approach achieves 35% better performance than Dirigent, a FaaS-only system, on a production workload at the same cost and outperforms other Kubernetes-compatible systems by 1.5-3.5x, reducing the cost by up to 70%.