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XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta

micahlerner.com

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

#11

Post by willvarfar »

smt88 wrote: post #8
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.

FaaS could be sharing your hardware at a function level inside the JVMs or whatever you are running, rather than at the VM or hypervisor level. You can (potentially) get much better elasticity and utilisation?

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

#12

Post by Capricorn2481 »

willvarfar wrote: post #11
smt88 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FaaS could be sharing your hardware at a function level inside the JVMs or whatever you are running, rather than at the VM or hypervisor level. You can (potentially) get much better elasticity and utilisation?

Isn't that just functions?

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

#13

Post by charcircuit »

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…

From the paper:

>The rapid growth at the end of 2022 is due to the launch of a new feature that allows for the use of Kafka-like data streams [12] to trigger function calls

In regards to opacity and observability I don't see why it would be any worse to run PHP code on XFaaS than running the PHP code on another host.

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

#14

Post by foofie »

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…

> 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?

FaaS is well justified from the point of view of an infrastructure provider. You get far better utilization from your hardware with a tradeoff of a convoluted software architecture and development model.

In theory you also get systems that are easier to manage as you don't have teams owning deployments from the OS and up, nor do they have to bother with managing their scaling needs.

It also makes sense in the technical side because when a team launches a service, 90% of the thing is just infrastructure code that needs to be in place to ultimately implement request handlers.

If that's all your team needs, why not get that redundancy out of the way?

Nevertheless we need to keep things in perspective, and avoid this FANG-focused cargo cult idiocy of mindlessly imitating any arbitrary decision regardless of making sense. FaaS makes sense if you are the infrastructure provider, and only if you have a pressing need to squeeze every single drop of utilization from your hardware. If your company does not fit this pattern, odds are you will be making a huge mistake by mimicking this decision.

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

#15

Post by zokier »

> To reduce latency, a common approach is to keep a VM idle for 10 minutes or longer after a function invocation to allow for potential reuse [45]. In contrast, if a FaaS platform is optimized for hardware utilization and throughput, this waiting time should be reduced by a factor of 10 or more, because starting a VM consumes significantly fewer resources than having a VM idle for 10 minutes

This seems somewhat surprising in such controlled environment. Why does idle function consume so many resources? If I think a normal Linux system, an idle process doesn't really consume much resources at all

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

#17

Post by oxfordmale »

smt88 wrote: post #8
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.

Self-hosted FaaS is only worth it if you are at the same size as Meta. If smaller companies do this, it would be a big red flag for me.

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

#18

Post by mike_hearn »

zokier wrote: post #15

> To reduce latency, a common approach is to keep a VM idle for 10 minutes or longer after a function invocation to allow for potential reuse [45]. In contrast, if a FaaS platform is optimized for hardware utilization and throughput, this waiting time should be reduced by a factor of 10 or more, because starting a VM consumes significantly fewer resources than having a VM idle for 10 minutes This seems somewhat surpr…

RAM, disk. Functions are often written in high level JITd languages, they may need to load large reference datasets from disk, they may require a lot of code to be transferred over the network before they can begin running, and because nobody trusts the security of the Linux kernel you also have to pay the VM startup time.

An idle process on Linux isn't much different: it consumes RAM, disk and a kernel. If you trust the software you're running enough you can amortize the kernel cost but the others remain.

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

#20

Post by freedomben »

charcircuit wrote: post #13
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…

From the paper: >The rapid growth at the end of 2022 is due to the launch of a new feature that allows for the use of Kafka-like data streams [12] to trigger function calls In regards to opacity and observability I don't see why it would be any worse to run PHP code on XFaaS than running the PHP code on another host.

Ah thanks, I missed that. Makes sense!
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