FaaS-Profiler: Serverless Tracing and Profiling

Serverless computing or Function-as-a-Service is an emerging and promising cloud execution model. The critical difference between Function-as-a-Service versus a traditional cloud execution method is that applications are broken down into smaller stateless functions that interact with each other driven by results, and the executing infrastructure is abstracted away for ease of use. In this process, the ability to collect performance metrics is hampered. We present the profiling and tracing framework FaaS-Profiler. The framework generalizes executions in a serverless environment. It is designed with the goal of instrumenting serverless functions without much effort, taking measurements to collect metrics, and tracing functions end to end. We evaluate our design with a concrete implementation in Python on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.