Understand the challenges and potentials of serverless computing for realtime networked multimedia

Frozen Mountain Software是一家位于不列颠哥伦比亚省萨里的加拿大软件公司，为基于互联网的实时通信需求提供先进的解决方案。云计算在支持Frozen mountain的服务方面起着至关重要的作用，它可以处理扩展到大量同时用户的问题。受流行的IaaS （Infrastructure as a Service）云的运营和定价模式的限制，用户不可避免地需要自己预留和管理云资源，并为空闲的服务器时间付费。此外，这些重量级的云服务器实例不能灵活地向上或向下扩展以满足工作负载。无服务器计算作为一种新的执行模型，正在克服传统云计算模型的弱点。它将服务器供应和管理的任务从开发人员转移到平台，并按更细粒度的时间尺度向用户收费，实现了长期承诺的“按需付费”定价策略。在这个项目中，一个由来自SFU和Frozen Mountain的研究人员和工程师组成的多学科团队将共同努力，了解将无服务器计算应用于网络多媒体服务的潜力和挑战。我们将在领先的无服务器计算平台上进行广泛的测量，并量化功能资源分配（例如，内存大小）、功能实现方案（例如，调用外部api）、分配的工作负载（例如，帧数）和典型网络多媒体应用程序平台选择的影响。然后，我们将开始开发新的解决方案，将无服务器计算集成到Frozen Mountain的产品中。

Frozen Mountain Software, a Canadian software company based on Surrey, BC, provides advanced solutions for Internet-based realtime communication needs. Cloud computing plays an essential role in supporting Frozen Moutain's services, which handle scaling to extremely large numbers of simultaneous users. Constrained by the operation and pricing model of the prevalent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, users inevitably need to reserve and manage cloud resources by themselves and pay for the idle server time. Further, these heavy-weight cloud server instances cannot scale up or down flexibly to meet the workloads. As a new execution model, serverless computing is emerging to overcome the weaknesses of traditional cloud computing models. It offloads the tasks of server provisioning and management from developers to platforms, and charges users at a finer-grained timescale, achieving the long-promised "pay-as-you-go" pricing strategy.In this project, a multi-disciplinary team involving researchers and engineers from both SFU and Frozen Mountain will work together to understand the potentials and challenges on applying serverless computing for networked multimedia services. We will conduct extensive measurements on leading serverless computing platforms and quantify the impact of function resource allocation (e.g., memory size), function implementation schemes (e.g., calling external APIs), allocated workload (e.g., the number of frames), and platform selection on typical networked multimedia applications. We will then start to develop novel solutions that integrate serverless computing into Frozen Mountain's products.