Lambada: Interactive Data Analytics on Cold Data Using Serverless Cloud Infrastructure

Serverless computing has recently attracted a lot of attention from research and industry due to its promise of ultimate elasticity and operational simplicity. However, there is no consensus yet on whether or not the approach is suitable for data processing. In this paper, we present Lambada, a serverless distributed data processing framework designed to explore how to perform data analytics on serverless computing. In our analysis, supported with extensive experiments, we show in which scenarios serverless makes sense from an economic and performance perspective. We address several important technical questions that need to be solved to support data analytics and present examples from several domains where serverless offers a cost and performance advantage over existing solutions.