KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019

Knative is a great platform to host web applications on Kubernetes, offering seamless request-based scaling as well as scale-to-zero.
As part of research at the Carnegie Mellon University to better understand the advantages and limitations of serverless platforms, we assessed Knative for two workloads that may differ from typical Web applications -- Machine Learning inference (ML) and Interactive Computing (IC). We focused on properties which are important for workloads with significant amount of state - such as ML model, or IC session - while still maintaining the ability to scale down to zero (and back to one) efficiently. In this talk we will present the initial results of an effort to design a Kubernetes-based serverless platform optimized for such workloads, focusing on two properties: 1) ability to efficiently persist state, 2) ability to deliver low latency under load spikes.