Using Cloud Functions as Accelerator for Elastic Data Analytics

Cloud function (CF) services, such as AWS Lambda, have been applied as the new computing infrastructure in implementing analytical query engines. For bursty and sparse workloads, CF-based query engine is more elastic than the traditional query engines running in servers, i.e., virtual machines (VMs), and might provide a higher performance/price ratio. However, it is still controversial whether CF services are good suites for general analytical workloads, in respect of the limitations of CFs in storage, network, and lifetime, as well as the much higher resource unit prices than VMs.

In this paper, we first present micro-benchmark evaluations of the features of CF and VM. We reveal that for query processing, though CF is more elastic than VM, it is less scalable and is more expensive for continuous workloads. Then, to get the best of both worlds, we propose Pixels-Turbo - a hybrid query engine that processes queries in a scalable VM cluster by default and invokes CFs to accelerate the processing of unpredictable workload spikes. In the query engine, we propose several optimizations to improve the performance and scalability of the CF-based operators and a cost-based optimizer to select the appropriate algorithm and parallelism for the physical query plan. Evaluations on TPC-H and real-world workload show that our query engine has a 1-2 orders of magnitude higher performance/price ratio than state-of-the-art serverless query engines for sustained workloads while not compromising the elasticity for workload spikes.