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

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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.