Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Cloud traffic is intermittent and bursty, but cloud bills are on 24/7. While many cloud providers have scale to zero mechanisms (i.e., putting an app to sleep if it's idle, and waking it up when requests for it arrive once again), these are slow, taking seconds or minutes to kick-in. In this lightning talk, we will show that leveraging tech from the Linux Foundation OSS Unikraft project (www.unikraft.org) we can fundamentally disrupt the semantics of scale to zero and autoscale in modern cloud deployments. Concretely, we will demo the ability to (1)*cold* start standard apps (web servers, databases, etc) in milliseconds; (2) scale them to 0 within milliseconds; and (3) wake them up within milliseconds of the next request coming in -- within an Internet RTT and thus not noticeable by end users. Finally, for a bit of fun, we will push the server to the limit, by loading it with thousands of these scaled to zero instances -- and take bets from the audience as to where the system might break.