Granular Computing and Network Intensive Applications: Friends or Foes?

Computing/infrastructure as a service continues to evolve with bare metal, virtual machines, containers and now serverless granular computing service offerings. Granular computing enables developers to decompose their applications into smaller logical units or functions, and run them on small, low cost and short lived computation containers without having to worry about setting up servers - hence the term serverless computing. While serverless environments can be used very cost effectively for large scale parallel processing data analytics applications, it is less clear if network intensive packet processing applications can also benefit from these new computing services as they do not share the same characteristics. This paper examines the architectural constraints as well as current serverless implementations to develop a position on this topic and influence the next generation of computing services. We support our position through measurement and experimentation on Amazon's AWS Lambda service with a few popular network functions.