Using application knowledge to reduce cold starts in FaaS services

In Function-as-a-Service platforms (FaaS), which have become very popular lately, code is deployed in the unit of single functions and the cloud provider handles resource management. There, a key problem is the so-called cold start problem: when a request comes in and no idle container can be found for the execution of the target function, then a new container needs to provisioned. In that case, the request incurs an extra latency - the cold start latency.