LoAPE: A Load-Aware and Power-Elastic Platform for Green Serverless Computing

Energy efficiency in serverless computing has remained under-explored despite its growing adoption. To fill this gap, we propose LoAPE, a load-aware and power-elastic serverless platform. Unlike existing methods limited to CPU core frequency scaling or density-based consolidation, LoAPE leverages c-states and uncore frequency scaling, which offer greater energy benefits but pose deployment challenges. Uncore changes affect the performance of all co-located functions, and cstates require sustained idle periods for effective energy savings. LoAPE’s insight is to strategically exploit function elasticity. By creating idle intervals across cores and servers, it enables aggressive c-state activation and uncore frequency reduction. To achieve this goal, LoAPE adopts topology-aware instance scheduling and eviction, which scale the number of active servers along with serverless functions. Within servers, LoAPE proactively manages active cores based on incoming loads. Our evaluations demonstrate that LoAPE delivers a 3.02× improvement in cluster energy reduction compared to frequency-scaling frameworks and extends savings by 1.17× over state-of-the-art density-aware schedulers, while meeting performance requirements.