TY - GEN
T1 - The serverless shell
AU - Mahéo, Aurèle
AU - Sutra, Pierre
AU - Tarrant, Tristan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/12/6
Y1 - 2021/12/6
N2 - Serverless computing is a recent paradigm to program the cloud. It allows to execute user-defined functions at scale, on demand, and in a pay-per-use manner. This paper reports on adapting the Unix shell for serverless. Our software, called the serverless shell (sshell), runs shell scripts on a serverless platform much like with a regular computer. It permits to reuse an existing code base while benefiting from the massive power of serverless and paying only for the resources used. sshell is built around a small set of components that includes a new inter-process communication layer for serverless. We evaluate it in AWS Lambda using several microbenchmarks and a large-scale application. Our results show that sshell achieves comparable or better performance than a high-end server. Moreover, it can be faster and more cost-efficient than a cluster-based solution to mine large datasets.
AB - Serverless computing is a recent paradigm to program the cloud. It allows to execute user-defined functions at scale, on demand, and in a pay-per-use manner. This paper reports on adapting the Unix shell for serverless. Our software, called the serverless shell (sshell), runs shell scripts on a serverless platform much like with a regular computer. It permits to reuse an existing code base while benefiting from the massive power of serverless and paying only for the resources used. sshell is built around a small set of components that includes a new inter-process communication layer for serverless. We evaluate it in AWS Lambda using several microbenchmarks and a large-scale application. Our results show that sshell achieves comparable or better performance than a high-end server. Moreover, it can be faster and more cost-efficient than a cluster-based solution to mine large datasets.
KW - function-as-a-service
KW - serverless computing
KW - shell
U2 - 10.1145/3491084.3491426
DO - 10.1145/3491084.3491426
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85121449455
T3 - Middleware 2021 Industry Track - Proceedings of the 2021 International Middleware Conference Industrial Track
SP - 9
EP - 15
BT - Middleware 2021 Industry Track - Proceedings of the 2021 International Middleware Conference Industrial Track
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 22nd International Middleware Conference, Middleware 2021
Y2 - 6 December 2021 through 10 December 2021
ER -