arXiv subjects

Niklas Kowallik

Publications and source records attributed to Niklas Kowallik.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Provuse: Platform-Side Function Fusion for Performance and Efficiency in FaaS Environments

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms provide scalable and cost-efficient execution but suffer from increased latency and resource overheads in complex applications comprising multiple functions, particularly due to double billing when functions call each other. This paper presents Provuse, a transparent, platform-side optimization that automatically performs function fusion at runtime for independently deployed functions, thereby eliminating redundant function instances. This approach reduces both cost and latency without requiring users to change any code. Provusetargets provider-managed FaaS platforms that retain control over function entry points and deployment artifacts, enabling transparent, runtime execution consolidation without developer intervention. We provide two implementations for this approach using the tinyFaaS platform as well as Kubernetes, demonstrating compatibility with container orchestration frameworks. An evaluation shows consistent improvements, achieving an average end-to-end latency reduction of 26.33% and a mean RAM usage reduction of 53.57%. These results indicate that automatic function fusion is an effective platform-side strategy for reducing latency and RAM consumption in composed FaaS applications, highlighting the potential of transparent infrastructure-level optimizations in serverless systems.

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arXiv2026

Serverless Abstractions for Short-Running, Lightweight Streams

Serverless computing and stream processing represent two dominant paradigms for event-driven data processing, yet both make assumptions that render them inefficient for short-running, lightweight, and unpredictable streams that require stateful processing. We propose stream functions as a novel extension of the Function-as-a-Serivce model that treat short streams as the unit of execution, state, and scaling. Stream functions process streams via an iterator-based interface, enabling seamless inter-event logic while retaining the elasticity and scale-to-zero capabilities offered by serverless platforms. Our evaluation shows that stream functions reduce the processing overhead by ~99 % compared to a mature stream process- ing engine in a video-processing use case. By providing comparable performance to serverless functions with stream semantics, stream functions provide an effective and efficient abstractions for a class of workloads underserved by existing models.

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arXiv2026

Konflux: Optimized Function Fusion for Serverless Applications

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) has become a central paradigm in serverless cloud computing, yet optimizing FaaS deployments remains challenging. Using function fusion, multiple functions can be combined into a single deployment unit, which can be used to reduce cost and latency of complex serverless applications comprising multiple functions. Even in small-scale applications, the number of possible fusion configurations is vast, making brute-force benchmarking in production both cost- and time-prohibitive. In this paper, we present a system that can analyze every possible fusion setup of complex applications. By emulating the FaaS platform, our system enables local experimentation, eliminating the need to reconfigure the live platform and significantly reducing associated cost and time. We evaluate all fusion configurations across a number of example FaaS applications and resource limits. Our results reveal that, when analyzing cost and latency trade-offs, only a limited set of fusion configurations represent optimal solutions, which are strongly influenced by the specific pricing model in use.

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arXiv2025

Multi-Event Triggers for Serverless Computing

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is an event-driven serverless cloud computing model in which small, stateless functions are invoked in response to events, such as HTTP requests, new database entries, or messages. Current FaaS platform assume that each function invocation corresponds to a single event. However, from an application perspective, it is desirable to invoke functions in response to a collection of events of different types or only with every n\textsuperscript{th} event. To implement this today, a function would need additional state management, e.g., in a database, and custom logic to determine whether its trigger condition is fulfilled and the actual application code should run. In such an implementation, most function invocations would be rendered essentially useless, leading to unnecessarily high resource usage, latency, and cost for applications. In this paper, we introduce multi-event triggers, through which complex conditions for function invocations can be specified. Specifically, we introduce abstractions for invoking functions based on a set of $n$ events and joins of multiple events of different types. This enables application developers to define intricate conditions for function invocations, workflow steps, and complex event processing. Our evaluation with a proof-of-concept prototype shows that this reduces event--invocation latency by 62.5\% in an incident detection use-case and that our system can handle more than 300,000 requests per second on limited hardware, which is sufficient load for implementation in large FaaS platforms.

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