Evaluating serverless function deployment models on the AWS Lambda service
Abstract
With the advancement of computing and serverless services in the last couple of years, this area has been growing rapidly. Currently, most cloud providers offer serverless services, in particular at Amazon, they have AWS Lambda to create Functions as a Service (FaaS). There are at least two ways to implement it: by compressing the source code and files into a compacted folder in a ZIP format; the second way is through a container image, which has the running application and its dependencies. Based on the approach selected, the function’s performance, cost and initialization time may vary. This paper takes into account these metrics and compares the aforementioned ways of deployment. Furthermore, it aims to discover which approach is the most adequate. Experiments conducted at AWS Lambda show that functions created with compressed ZIP folders present advantages, regarding their initialization time during cold start mode and cost.
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