With the ever-increasing usage of serverless computing in both industry and academia, it is essential to understand the mechanisms that power the underlying platforms. As serverless is more than ten years old, there are different platforms with vastly different approaches. We show that, next to the traditional and popular platforms, a second generation of serverless platform has emerged. While first-generation platforms are based on containerized, centralized execution, the new generation leverages lightweight isolates and edge deployment. This evolution reduces warm request latency from approximately 40 ms to around 10 ms and reduces cold starts to an afterthought, but limits the execution environment. In this paper, we gather and analyze all publicly available information to provide detailed insights into the underlying architecture of seven platforms and then run a microbenchmark-based evaluation totaling more than 38 million function calls to gain a deeper understanding their performance.

翻译：随着无服务器计算在工业界和学术界的应用日益广泛，理解驱动底层平台的运行机制变得至关重要。由于无服务器技术已发展超过十年，当前存在多种采用截然不同方法的平台。研究表明，除了传统的主流平台外，第二代无服务器平台已经崛起。第一代平台基于容器化集中式执行架构，而新生代平台则充分利用轻量级隔离机制和边缘部署。这一演进将热请求延迟从约40毫秒降低至约10毫秒，并使冷启动问题几乎不再成为困扰，但同时也限制了执行环境。本文收集并分析了所有公开可用的信息，深入剖析了七个平台的底层架构，随后通过包含超过3800万次函数调用的微基准测试评估，进一步深入理解其性能表现。