A framework for trace-driven simulation of serverless Function-as-a-Service platforms.

faas-sim Overview

faas-sim is a trace-driven simulation framework to simulate container-based function-as-a-service platforms. It can be used to develop, and evaluate the performance of operational strategies for such systems, like scheduling, autoscaling, load balancing, and others.

Architecture

faas-sim is based on the SimPy discrete-event simulation framework. It uses Ether as network simulation layer, and as source for cluster configurations and network topologies. By default, it uses the Skippy scheduling system for serverless resource scheduling, but schedulers, autoscalers, and load-balancers can be plugged in by the user. faas-sim is trace-driven, and uses profiling data from real workloads and devices to simulate function execution. It comes pre-packaged with traces from several common computing devices and representative cluster workloads. The following figure shows a high-level overview:

Background

faas-sim was developed at the Distributed Systems Group at TU Wien as part of a larger research effort surrounding serverless edge computing systems.