The document is a slide deck presentation by Mikhail Shilkov on serverless performance. Some key points from the slides include: cold starts can significantly impact performance; serverless applications are uniquely suitable for spiky unpredictable loads but there are limits to scalability if dependent services are not serverless; and it is important to understand the serverless runtime and resource models to build applications effectively for the serverless paradigm.

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Performance Tales of Serverless
Mikhail Shilkov
AMSTERDAM | MAY 8-9, 2018

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• “You Don’t Want to Build a Serverless Monolith”
• “Democratizing Serverless: the New Open Source, Cloud Agnostic
Functions Platform”
• “Performance Tales of Serverless”
• “Continuous delivering serverless applications in the pipeline:
indispensable advice from the trenches”
• “Serverless Swift APIs with Apache OpenWhisk”
• “The serverless full stack”
• “Thinking twice about migrating to Serverless”

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No servers to manage
Implicit high availability
20k requests/day free
Python!

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“
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@MikhailShilkov
James Governor,
Analyst & Co-founder at
RedMonk
We’re going to see
the first billion-dollar startup
with a single employee,
the founder, and that engineer will
be using serverless technology

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1 user 100 users 10k users 1 mln users

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1 user 100 users 10k users 1 mln users
ResponseTime

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Cold starts

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UNDERSTAND
THE RUNTIME

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COLD STARTS
ARE SLOW(-ER)
…and depend on language
and package size

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BE CREATIVE
IN USAGE SCENARIOS

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IS LIMITED BY
NON-SERVERLESS DEPENDENCIES
SERVERLESS SCALABILITY

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can LOAD TEST or DDoS
any “mere mortal” service
SERVERLESS APPLICATION

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EVENT BASED
ASYNC FTW
SERVERLESS IS NOT JUST HTTP

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LIMITS, SCALING MODE,
RAM & CPU ALLOCATION
LEARN RESOURCE MODEL:

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const http = require('http');
const agent = new http.Agent({keepAlive: true});
exports.mycloudfunction = (req, res) => {
req = http.get({
host: '...',
port: 80,
path: '...',
agent: agent
}, // ...

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SPIKY LOAD…
SERVERLESS
IS UNIQUELY SUITABLE FOR
BUT KNOW THE LIMITS

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• Throughput is probably enough
• Your app should not be critical to latency
• There is no SLA
• Don’t forget tooling, architecture, pricing

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• Prototypes
• Low traffic apps
• Cloud Glue
• Unusual load profiles

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• http://blog.myroomabroad.com/story-room-abroad/
• https://www.nesta.org.uk/news/12-predictions-2012
• https://bestresellerhostingprovider.com/differences-between-dedicated-
and-shared-servers/
• https://thebohemianbreeze.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/design-
2711676.jpg