Fast Function Instantiation with Alternate Virtualization Approaches

This paper focuses on the need for emerging domains such as serverless and in-network computing, where applications are often hosted on virtualized compute instances (e.g., containers and unikernels), to have applications startup as quickly as possible. We provide a qualitative and quantitative analysis of containers and unikernels with regard to the startup time. We analyze these in-depth and identify the key components and their impact under scale on the startup latency. We study how startup time scales as we launch multiple instances concurrently. We study the contribution of popular Container Networking Interfaces (CNIs), to the startup time.