New Kids: An Architecture and Performance Investigation of Second-Generation Serverless Platforms
Provides a systematic comparison of first- and second-generation serverless platforms for cloud practitioners and researchers, clarifying trade-offs in latency and execution environment constraints.
This paper identifies and analyzes second-generation serverless platforms that use lightweight isolates and edge deployment, reducing warm request latency from ~40 ms to ~10 ms and nearly eliminating cold starts, based on over 38 million function calls across seven platforms.
With the ever-increasing usage of serverless computing in both industry and academia, it is essential to understand the mechanisms that power the underlying platforms. As serverless is more than ten years old, there are different platforms with vastly different approaches. We show that, next to the traditional and popular platforms, a second generation of serverless platform has emerged. While first-generation platforms are based on containerized, centralized execution, the new generation leverages lightweight isolates and edge deployment. This evolution reduces warm request latency from approximately 40 ms to around 10 ms and reduces cold starts to an afterthought, but limits the execution environment. In this paper, we gather and analyze all publicly available information to provide detailed insights into the underlying architecture of seven platforms and then run a microbenchmark-based evaluation totaling more than 38 million function calls to gain a deeper understanding their performance.