When Serverless Computing Meets Different Degrees of Customization for DNN Inference

Serverless computing provides a method to develop application services without the burden of run-time execution environment management overhead. Since the initial offerings of serverless computing using function-as-a-service (FaaS), other variants of execution environments have been proposed, such as a special-purpose FaaS (SPF) for dep neural network (DNN) inference and a serverless container service (SCS) for web application. This paper qualitatively summarizes the characteristics of a general-purpose FaaS (GPF), SPF, and SCS. To judge whether various serverless computing environments can be feasible solutions for an interactive DNN model inference application, we conduct extensive experiments and summarize the opportunities and challenges.