XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

#1

Post by greghn » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 5:15 AM UTC

XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta
micahlerner.com

Re: XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

#2

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 6:27 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

#3

Post by freedomben » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 7:34 AM UTC

It's interesting to see the heavily growing demand graph. Is that because people want to adopt it, or is it being mandated or encouraged as "best practice" etc? I'm not implying that true organic demand wouldn't exist because it definitely might, but I have seen in practice where leadership encourages or even mandates usage of FaaS, so the numbers go up even though on a neutral field people wouldn't necessarily choose it. There's also the "I'd like to try it" group who hasn't yet had experience with it so choose it as a target for learning/curiosity reasons.

I wonder because my own experience with FaaS has been mostly bad. There are some nice things for sure, and a handful of use cases where it's wonderfully superior, such as executing jobs where number of concurrent processes fluctuates wildly making rapid scalability highly desirable. The canonical use case being "make a thumbnail for this image."

For web servers though, I find the opacity and observability, and the difficulty running locally to be significant hindrances. There's also lock-in which I hate with a passion. At this point I'd rather manage static EC2 instances than Lambdas, for example. (To be clear I'm not advocating static EC2 instances. My preference is Kubernetes all the things. Not perfect of course, but K8s makes horizontal scalability very easy while improving on visibility, but that's a different conversation)

Re: XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

#4

Post by danpalmer » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 7:38 AM UTC

> Furthermore, XFaaS explicitly does not handle functions and the path of a user-interaction

The wording of this is a little strange, but does this really mean that XFaaS is not used to serve end-user traffic at all?

The general approach here is interesting. I've always thought that there are two potential benefits for Function-based hosting ("Serverless") – low cost of components via scale-to-zero infrastructure (good for rare events, or highly variable traffic), and developer experience (coding against an infra framework rather than build-your-own infra). I'd have expected the former to be much less of an issue at scale, to the point where it's not the leading benefit, so I expected to hear more about the dev productivity side, but instead this article focuses significantly on the performance and cost side of things.

Re: XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

#5

Post by Rodeoclash » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 7:40 AM UTC

Any insight to what kinds of work is being run in the functions? I run a lot of jobs in background queues but I'm wondering if I'm missing out on some new paradigm.

Re: XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

#6

Post by maigret » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 8:01 AM UTC

Rodeoclash wrote: post #5

Any insight to what kinds of work is being run in the functions? I run a lot of jobs in background queues but I'm wondering if I'm missing out on some new paradigm.

They recently mentioned functions as well in an article about the Threads infrastructure. https://engineering.fb.com/2023/12/19/core-infra/how-meta-bu...

Re: XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

#7

Post by rafaelturk » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 8:02 AM UTC

Inovation regarding FaaS comes from BigTechs. I wish we had more OpenSource FaaS solutions, albeit OpenFaas amazing achievements still lacks more robust ecosystem.

Re: XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

#8

Post by smt88 » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 8:15 AM UTC

rafaelturk wrote: post #7

Inovation regarding FaaS comes from BigTechs. I wish we had more OpenSource FaaS solutions, albeit OpenFaas amazing achievements still lacks more robust ecosystem.

What would the point of self-hosted FaaS be?

They lose their whole value proposition when you're paying for dedicated servers or when you don't have large numbers of servers.

Re: XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

#9

Post by willvarfar » Wed, Jan 31, 2024, 8:19 AM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #3

It's interesting to see the heavily growing demand graph. Is that because people want to adopt it, or is it being mandated or encouraged as "best practice" etc? I'm not implying that true organic demand wouldn't exist because it definitely might, but I have seen in practice where leadership encourages or even mandates usage of FaaS, so the numbers go up even though on a neutral field people wouldn't necessarily choos…

Yeah it sucks to be a FaaS customer on a cloud run by someone else... you're just overpaying for easy instead of simple etc.

But if you're in Meta, and you're running on an abstraction built and maintained by Meta, then the it's running for cost instead of profit and the the incentives all align between user and infrastructure provider?

I imagine the development and deployment ease for a system at Meta for Meta could be dreamy. At least, it has the potential to be... :)