ICSA Colloquium Talk-26/06/2023

Title: Slashing the Virtualization Tax in Serverless Clouds 

Abstract The future of cloud computing is currently at an impasse. On the one hand, cloud computing is evolving in the direction of resource disaggregation, high elasticity, high density, and hands-off infrastructure management. Serverless is a clear example of this trend. On the other hand, existing virtualization stacks (Virtual Machines, Containers, and Language Runtimes) are slow to start and impose a high memory footprint tax. The combination of high elasticity and density with bloated virtualization stacks is fundamentally at odds, exposing a great tension between the serverless vision and existing virtualization infrastructure. In other words, existing virtualization technology was fundamental to building cloud computing as we know it today, but is also now becoming its limiting factor. In this talk, I propose revisiting sandboxing technology to enable extreme virtualization stack density by allowing concurrent serverless functions to co-execute on a single stack. 

Short Bio: Rodrigo Bruno is an Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon) and a Senior Researcher INESC-ID Lisbon. Before joining Técnico, Rodrigo was a Senior Researcher at Oracle Labs Zurich working on GraalVM. Rodrigo joined Oracle Labs after spending two years as a Post-doc researcher at ETH Zurich, which he started after receiving his Ph.D. from Instituto Superior Técnico. Most of his research focuses on the intersection between Systems and Programming Languages, with particular focus on language runtimes, cloud computing, virtualization, operating systems, and compilers. Over time, Rodrigo's research has been contributed to several open-source projects such as the OpenJDK HotSpot JVM, GraalVM, V8, and CRIU.