Serverless computing is increasingly popular because of the promise of lower
cost and the convenience it provides to users who do not need to focus on
server management. This has resulted in the availability of a number of
proprietary and open-source serverless solutions. We seek to understand how the
performance of serverless computing depends on a number of design issues using
several popular open-source serverless platforms. We identify the
idiosyncrasies affecting performance (throughput and latency) for different
open-source serverless platforms. Further, we observe that just having either
resource-based (CPU and memory) or workload-based (request per second (RPS) or
concurrent requests) auto-scaling is inadequate to address the needs of the
serverless platforms.