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COMP5123M
1. Assignment guidance This exercise aims to give you some practical
experience of using serverless architectures. It will also give you the
opportunity to research on the cloud computing domain of Function as
a Service (FaaS), technologies and performance.
Serverless computing is revolutionising cloud application development
as it offers the ability to create modular, highly-scalable, fault-tolerant
applications, with minimal operational management. In order to con
tribute to the widespread adoption of serverless platforms, the perfor
mance of functions, including workflows, running on such platforms is
key. This coursework aims to investigate the performance of workflow
functions on two different platforms: commercial and open-source.
You should carefully review the lecture notes on this topic before you
start work.
2. Assessment tasks
(a) For the investigation, consider the following platforms: Microsoft
Azure Functions serverless solution and OpenFaas;
(b) Research into the performance of serverless workflows deployed
on serverless architectures (commercial and open-source) to pro
vide insight into their capabilities and increase awareness of their
potential;
(c) Design a set of experiments to assess the performance on each
serverless platform considering one language runtime of your choice.
You can choose, for example, among Python, Java and Node.js.
Propose a cloud-based technical implementation for comparison
and analysis of your serverless workflow, and demonstrate their
performance in terms of runtime and resource consumption.
1 Requirements
(a) Related work in the literature: identify at least two research pa
pers that report on serverless workflows. Extra marks will be
allocated when considering a thorough review of the literature.
(b) Consider a serverless workflow of your choice, e.g. image pro
cessing pipeline, parallel processing, machine learning etc. The
2workflow should have a minimum of two functions and a maxi
mum of three. Extra marks will be allocated when considering
three functions.
(c) Consider one programming language for the implementation of
your functions;
(d) Consider the aspect of scalability by increasing the number of
function invocations;
(e) Report your performance results.
Note. You need to install OpenFaaS, e.g. on a Virtual Machine run
ning on Microsoft Azure.
3. General guidance and study support Learning resources and use
ful links are available in COMP5123M area on Minerva. Help is also
available on the module Teams channel.
4. Assessment criteria and marking process
Address the questions in relation the problem motivation, related work,
workflow composition originality, experimental design and implemen
tation, discussion of results, and evidence of execution. Distribution of
marks:
3Report
Problem motivation 5
Related work 5
Workflow originality 5
Experimental Design and Implementation 10
Results 10
Quality of evaluation 10
Code/scripts 5
50
Coursework feedback and return of marks will be available on Grade
scope (expected date: 4 weeks after coursework submission).
5. Presentation and referencing
The quality of written English will be assessed in this work. As a
minimum, you must ensure:
❼ Paragraphs are used
❼ There are links between and within paragraphs although these
may be ineffective at times
❼ There are (at least) attempts at referencing
❼ Word choice and grammar do not seriously undermine the mean
ing and comprehensibility of the argument
❼ Word choice and grammar are generally appropriate to an aca
demic text.
These are pass/ fail criteria. So irrespective of marks awarded else
where, if you do not meet these criteria you will fail overall.
46. Submission requirements
The following deliverables are expected:
(a) a research report on the domain of investigation: answer all the
questions available on Gradescope.
(b) material developed as part of the experiment design (code, scripts).
The deliverables should be submitted on Gradescope. To submit your
code for the exercise, you can either: 1) provide a link to Git, or 2)
create a Zip or tar archive of the files which make up your system
and upload it on Gradescope. If you have organised your files into a
directory hierarchy, then package this as a single Zip or tar archive.
7. Academic misconduct and plagiarism
Academic integrity means engaging in good academic practice. This
involves essential academic skills, such as keeping track of where you
find ideas and information and referencing these accurately in your
work.
By submitting this assignment you are confirming that the work is a
true expression of your own work and ideas and that you have given
credit to others where their work has contributed to yours.
8. Assessment/marking criteria grid
This coursework is marked out of 50 and accounts for 20% of the assess
ment. A lateness submision penalty will apply (5% of the maximum
available mark per day).