Serverless Computing: An Empirical Evaluation of Application Performance and Power Consumption in Knative

This paper investigates Knative, an open source serverless framework, and its performance and power consumption behaviours when running different types of applications. As such, it addresses the following research question to gain an understanding of the power consumption and performance benefits Knative may bring to a cloud environment under varying workload conditions: How do different types of serverless applications impact power consumption and performance in Knative Serving, compared to equivalent applications deployed on containers? The experimental results reveal that Knative can eliminate the idle power consumption of deployed applications due to its scale-to-zero capabilities. More notably, for applications operating near CPU and memory limits, using Knative to scale additional instances of the application can reduce response times without proportionally increasing overall power consumption.