Serverless computing has become a new trending paradigm in cloud computing, allowing developers to focus on the development of core application logic and rapidly construct the prototype via the composition of independent functions. With the development and prosperity of serverless computing, major cloud vendors have successively rolled out their commodity serverless computing platforms. However, the characteristics of these platforms have not been systematically studied. Measuring these characteristics can help developers to select the most adequate serverless computing platform and develop their serverless-based applications in the right way. To fill this knowledge gap, we present a comprehensive study on characterizing mainstream commodity serverless computing platforms, including AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and Alibaba Cloud Function Compute. Specifically, we conduct both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. In qualitative analysis, we compare these platforms from three aspects (i.e., development, deployment, and runtime) based on their official documentation to construct a taxonomy of characteristics. In quantitative analysis, we analyze the runtime performance of these platforms from multiple dimensions with well-designed benchmarks. First, we analyze three key factors that can influence the startup latency of serverless-based applications. Second, we compare the resource efficiency of different platforms with 16 representative benchmarks. Finally, we measure their performance difference when dealing with different concurrent requests, and explore the potential causes in a black-box fashion. Based on the results of both qualitative and quantitative analysis, we derive a series of findings and provide insightful implications for both developers and cloud vendors.

翻译：无服务器计算已成为云计算领域的新兴范式，使开发者得以专注于核心应用逻辑的开发，并通过独立函数的组合快速构建原型。随着无服务器计算的发展与繁荣，各大云服务商相继推出其商品化无服务器计算平台。然而，这些平台的特性尚未得到系统研究。对这些特性的测量有助于开发者选择最合适的无服务器计算平台，并以正确方式开发基于无服务器的应用程序。为填补这一认知空白，我们提出了一项针对主流商品化无服务器计算平台（包括AWS Lambda、Google Cloud Functions、Azure Functions及阿里云函数计算）的综合性特性研究。具体而言，我们同时进行了定性分析与定量分析。在定性分析中，我们基于各平台官方文档，从开发、部署和运行时三个维度进行比较，构建了特性分类体系。在定量分析中，我们通过精心设计的基准测试从多个维度分析这些平台的运行时性能。首先，我们剖析了影响无服务器应用程序启动延迟的三个关键因素。其次，使用16个代表性基准测试比较了不同平台的资源效率。最后，我们测量了它们处理不同并发请求时的性能差异，并以黑盒方式探究潜在原因。基于定性与定量分析结果，我们提炼出一系列发现，并为开发者和云服务商提供了富有洞见的启示。