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Grant support

This work has been partly funded by the EU Horizon programme under the grant agreements: 101092644 (NearData), 101092646 (CloudSkin), and 101093110 (EXTRACT). German T. Eizaguirre is recipient of a pre-doctoral FPU grant from the Spanish Ministry of Universities (ref. FPU21/00630). Special thanks to Pau Balanza-Malagelada and Jordi Canosa-Casellas for their support in the experimentation phase.

Analysis of institutional authors

Eizaguirre, German TCorresponding AuthorBarcelona-Pons, DanielAuthorArjona, AitorAuthorGarcia-Lopez, PedroAuthor

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Serverful Functions: Leveraging Servers in Complex Serverless Workflows (industry track)

Publicated to: 15-21 - 2024-01-01 (), DOI: 10.1145/3700824.3701095

Authors: Eizaguirre, German T; Barcelona-Pons, Daniel; Arjona, Aitor; Vernik, Gil; Garcia-Lopez, Pedro; Alexandrov, Theodore

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Abstract

The scalability of cloud functions makes them a convenient backend for elastic data analytics pipelines where parallelism changes drastically from one stage to the next. However, cloud functions require intermediate storage systems for communication, which limits the efficiency of stateful operations. Furthermore, cloud functions are expensive, which reduces the cost-effectiveness of pure serverless architectures. We propose a hybrid architecture for data analytics that uses cloud functions for embarrassingly parallel stages and virtual cloud instances for stateful operations under a unified serverless programming framework. Extending Lithops, a serverless programming library, we implement a parallel programming interface that proactively provisions serverless and serverful cloud resources with minimal user intervention. We validate the feasibility of a hybrid architecture, by comparing it to fully serverless and serverful versions of a production-level metabolomics pipeline. We show that mixing cloud functions with virtual instances increases the cost-effectiveness of the execution by up to 188.23% over the serverless implementation, while achieving a speedup of 3.64 compared to the serverful one.

Keywords

Cloud computingFunction-as-a-serviceResource allocationResource efficiencResource efficiencyServerless computing

Quality index

Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-06-03:

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 2.85.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 3 (Altmetric).

Leadership analysis of institutional authors

This work has been carried out with international collaboration, specifically with researchers from: Germany; Israel.

There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author (Eizaguirre Suárez, Germán Telmo) .

the author responsible for correspondence tasks has been Eizaguirre Suárez, Germán Telmo.