Along with the rise of domain-specific computing (ASICs hardware) and domain-specific programming languages, we envision that the next step is the emergence of domain-specific cloud platforms. Developing such platforms for popular applications in the serverless manner, not only can offer a higher efficiency to both users and providers, it can also expedite the application development cycles and enable users to become solution-oriented and focus on their specific business logic. Considering multimedia streaming as one of the most trendy applications in the IT industry, the goal of this study is to develop SMSE, the first domain-specific serverless platform for multimedia streaming. SMSE democratizes multimedia service development via enabling content providers (or even end-users) to rapidly develop their desired functionalities on their multimedia contents. Upon developing SMSE, the next goal of this study is to deal with its efficiency challenges and develop a function container provisioning method that can efficiently utilize cloud resources and improve the users' QoS. In particular, we develop a dynamic method that provisions durable or ephemeral containers depending on the spatiotemporal and data-dependency characteristics of the functions. Evaluating the prototype implementation of SMSE under real-world settings demonstrates its capability to reduce both the containerization overhead, and the makespan time of serving multimedia processing functions (by up to 30%) in compare to the function provision methods that are being used in the general-purpose serverless cloud systems.

翻译：随着领域专用计算（ASICs硬件）与领域专用编程语言的兴起，我们预见下一步将是领域专用云平台的出现。以无服务计算方式开发面向主流应用的此类平台，不仅能提升用户与服务提供方的双重效率，还能缩短应用开发周期，使用户转向解决方案导向并专注于具体业务逻辑。鉴于多媒体流媒体已成为IT行业最热门的应用之一，本研究旨在开发SMSE——首个面向多媒体流媒体的领域专用无服务计算平台。SMSE通过使内容提供商（甚至终端用户）能够基于其多媒体内容快速开发所需功能，推动多媒体服务开发的大众化。在构建SMSE之后，本研究的后续目标是应对其效率挑战，开发一种能够高效利用云资源并改善用户服务质量（QoS）的函数容器配置方法。具体而言，我们提出一种动态方法：根据函数的时空特性与数据依赖性特征，配置持久性容器或临时容器。在真实场景下对SMSE原型系统的评估表明，与通用无服务云系统中使用的函数配置方法相比，该方法可将容器化开销降低，并将多媒体处理函数的服务完成时间缩短高达30%。