Has Your FaaS Application Been Decommissioned Yet? -- A Case Study on the Idle Timeout in Function as a Service Infrastructure

Abstract

Function as a Service (FaaS) is a new cloud technology with automated resource management. Different from traditional cloud computing, each FaaS cloud function can only run a fixed period of time before being decommissioned. Furthermore, FaaS cloud providers often update their platforms (e.g., idle timeout). These changes and their associated impact are not transparent and could potentially impact the execution of the cloud functions. Hence, in this paper, we develop a methodology to characterize the cloud function idle timeout which is the duration a FaaS cloud provider keeps a cloud function instance alive without serving active traffic. Our study was conducted on three popular FaaS platforms, namely AWS Lambda, IBM and Azure Cloud Function. Moreover, we also report how long a cloud function instance can be kept alive when a user regularly polls the instance. Experimental results show that the idle timeout period has evolved from 01/2020 till 01/2022.