CLOUD COMPUTING SEMINAR SERIES
Title: Learning-Centric, Payload and QoS-Aware Function Resource Configuration and Management in Serverless Computing
Speaker: Siddharth Agarwal, University of Melbourne
Date & Time: January 12, 2026 (Monday), 4PM
Venue: CDS 102 Seminar Hall
ABSTRACT
Serverless computing, primarily Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), has surged for cloud-native micro-services by offloading infrastructure management to the cloud provider, boosting developer productivity. FaaS executes small, stateless, event-driven functions with an attractive pay-per-use economic model. However, FaaS faces performance challenges like cold starts and auto-scaling bottlenecks. These issues are worsened by the platform’s static resource configurations, forcing developers into suboptimal choices, creating a conflict between performance and cost, and hindering efficient dynamic resource management. This seminar presents research that aims to address these limitations by exploring learning-centric function configuration and management to improve operational cost, resource utilisation while maintaining acceptable user Quality-of-Service (QoS).
BIOGRAPHY
Siddharth Agarwal is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he was a member of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory. Supervised by Professor Rajkumar Buyya and Dr. Maria Rodriguez, his doctoral research focused on optimising Serverless computing (FaaS) environments using AI/ML-driven resource management. He is a recipient of the Melbourne Research Scholarship for his Doctoral studies and the Dean’s Honors List (2021) during his Masters. He also brings industry perspective from his tenure as an Associate System Engineer at IBM India. His current research interests lie at the intersection of data-driven workload-aware and autonomous resource configuration and management of resources in serverless cloud ecosystems.
Host Faculty: Prof. Yogesh Simmhan
ABOUT: The IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud Lab (IIHCL) hosted at IISc is curating the Cloud Computing Seminar series with guest speakers from Industry and Academia speaking about the latest technologies and research on Cloud and edge computing, distributed computing systems, and AI/ML/Big Data platforms.
ALL ARE WELCOME
