Power synchronization: taming massive diversified serverless functions under power constraints

Du Liu, Lu Zhang, Yechen Xu, Xinkai Wang, Lingyu Sun, Yifei Pu, Xiaofeng Hou, Chao Li, Minyi Guo

Abstract: Carbon neutrality has become an important design objective worldwide. However, the on-going shift to cloud-naive era does not necessarily mean energy efficiency. From the perspective of power management, co-hosted serverless functions are difficult to tame. They are lightweight, short-lived applications sensitive to power capping activities. In addition, they exhibit great individual and temporal variability, presenting idiosyncratic performance/power scaling goals that are often at odds with one another. To date, very few proposals exist in terms of tailored power management for serverless platforms. In this work, we introduce power synchronization, a novel yet generic mechanism for managing serverless functions in a power-efficient way. Our insight with power synchronization is that uniform application power behavior enables consistent and uncompromised function operation on shared host machines. We also propose PowerSync, a synchronization-based power management framework that ensures optimal efficiency based on a clear understanding of functions. Our evaluation shows that PowerSync can improve the energy efficiency of functions by up to 16% without performance loss compared to conventional power management strategies.