Tapping into NFV Environment for Opportunistic Serverless Edge Function Deployment

Even with Network Function Virtualization (NFV), many commodity network servers have spare cycles. Despite that they are small and irregularly occur, spare cycles are fit for deploying short-lived serverless computing functions at the network edge. In this work, we perform detailed analyses of the benefits and limitations of co-locating serverless functions on NFV-ready servers. We propose NEMO, a novel platform that enables efficient serverless edge function deployment in the NFV environment. NEMO can intelligently harvest spare cycles of network functions to warm up the serverless functions and speed up the function invocation in an agile manner. Besides, NEMO can judiciously manage the thread conflict in a resource-limited environment. We build a prototype of NEMO. Our thorough evaluations show that NEMO can harvest up to 41% spare cycles and achieve about 12.5 similar to 25X performance improvement compared with straightforward co-location.