Flock: A Low-Cost Streaming Query Engine on FaaS Platforms

In this paper, we present Flock, a cloud-native streaming query engine that leverages the on-demand elasticity of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms to perform real-time data analytics. Traditional server-centric deployments often suffer from resource under- or over-provisioning, leading to resource wastage or performance degradation. Flock addresses these issues by providing more fine-grained elasticity that can dynamically match the per-query basis with continuous scaling, and its billing methods are more fine-grained with millisecond granularity, making it a low-cost solution for stream processing. Our approach, payload invocation, eliminates the need for external storage services and eliminates the requirement for a query coordinator in the data architecture. Our evaluation shows that Flock significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems in terms of cost, especially on ARM processors, making it a promising solution for real-time data analytics on FaaS platforms.