Open Characterization and Optimization of the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider Source Project Health

Function as a Service (FaaS) has gained tremendous popularity as a way to deploy computations to serverless back ends in the cloud. We performed the first characterization of an entire production FaaS environment (Azure Functions). Our characterization revealed many unique aspects of serverless workloads compared to traditional cloud applications. Using this deep understanding, we designed a new dynamic resource management policy to improve the performance and reduce the memory footprint of serverless workloads. This new policy is now deployed in production, and our characterization data traces are publicly released for researchers.