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We are witnessing the emergence of elastic web services which are hosted in public cloud infrastructures. For reasons of cost-effectiveness, it is crucial for the elasticity of these web services to match the dynamically-evolving user demand. Traditional approaches employ clusters of virtual machines (VMs) to dynamically scale resources based on application demand. However, they still face challenges such as higher cost due to over-provisioning or incur service level objective (SLO) violations due to under-provisioning. Motivated by this observation, we propose Spock, a new scalable and elastic control system that exploits both VMs and serverless functions to reduce cost and ensure SLO for elastic web services. We show that under two different scaling policies, Spock reduces SLO violations of queries by up to 74% when compared to VM-based resource procurement schemes. Further, Spock yields significant cost savings, by up to 33% compared to traditional approaches which use only VMs.
Gunasekaran et al. (Mon,) studied this question.