All but one

Abstract

Serverless computing through Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms is a popular new cloud computing model, offering high elasticity while being fully-managed. However, FaaS platforms do not quantify elasticity; thus, application developers are unaware of how elastic FaaS platforms are. This paper is an extended version of [18]. The original paper proposes an experiment design and corresponding toolkit for observing elasticity and its associated trade-offs with latency, reliability, and execution costs. Results for evaluating four popular FaaS platforms by AWS, Google, IBM, and Microsoft indicate significant short-comings in terms of elasticity for all but AWS's service offer. One year later, we reproduced all experiments and revisited our discussions. We report significant improvements by Google and IBM. Our results indicate that (currently) all but Microsoft's FaaS platform are elastic with differences in latency and execution costs.