Video processing with serverless computing: a measurement study

Miao Zhang, Yifei Zhu, Cong Zhang, Jiangchuan Liu

Abstract: The growing demand for video processing and the advantages in scalability and cost reduction brought by the emerging serverless computing have attracted significant attention in serverless computing powered video processing. However, how to implement and configure serverless functions to optimize the performance and cost of video processing applications remains unclear. In this paper, we explore the configuration and implementation schemes of typical video processing functions deployed to the serverless platforms and quantify their influence on the execution duration and monetary cost from a developer's perspective. Our measurement reveals that memory configuration is non-trivial. Dynamic profiling of workloads is necessary to find the best memory configuration. Moreover, compared with calling external video processing APIs, implementing these services locally in serverless functions can be competitive. We also find that the performance of video processing applications could be affected by the underlying infrastructure. Our work provides guidelines for further function-level optimization and complements the existing measurement studies for both serverless computing and video processing.