Benchmarking Functions Versus Containers for Compute-Intensive Workloads
Journal
2025 33rd Telecommunications Forum (TELFOR)
Date Issued
2025-11-25
Author(s)
Krajchevska, Evgenija
DOI
10.1109/telfor67910.2025.11314376
Abstract
Platform choices for compute-intensive jobs are often made without a disciplined, workload-specific comparison. This paper examines two dominant execution models, Functions-as-a-Service and Containers-as-a-Service, using a simple CPUbound kernel. We implement functionally equivalent services on both models, vary input sizes and resource allocations, and exercise sequential and bursty request patterns at comparable resource tiers to characterize performance, cost trade-offs, and scaling behavior. The study provides a controlled, reproducible protocol for comparing the models on compute-bound tasks and reports how memory and concurrency influence latency. The methodology is extensible, meaning the kernel can be swapped for other algorithms while preserving the measurement pipeline.