How much will that Lambda cost? An undergraduate thesis predicts execution time in serverless
Lucas Ganda Carvalho and Wíctor Bastos Girardi defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis investigating execution-time prediction for AWS Lambda functions — a key input for cost estimation in serverless environments.
Brasília, July 27, 2023
In serverless, cost is a direct function of time. A function that runs in 200ms pays one fare; the same function running in 800ms pays four times that. Yet predicting that time before actually running is an underdeveloped discipline — the market typically decides by isolated benchmarks and optimism. This vacuum is where the undergraduate thesis defended in July 2023 by Lucas Ganda Carvalho and Wíctor Bastos Girardi steps in, advised by Prof. Daniel Sundfeld Lima .
The work approaches the problem with instrumentation: rather than estimating time by analogy, it proposes a predictive approach for Lambda functions that combines code features with data observed in controlled runs. Predicting accurately matters for two practical reasons: when cost is well estimated, architecture gains the freedom to choose between serverless and traditional options; when it is misestimated, the team learns the price only after the billing cycle closes.
By placing high-performance computing under the serverless lens, the thesis contributes to a research agenda that remains active at CEDIS — culminating, in 2025, in a master’s dissertation on Nimbus, a serverless environment for automatic code grading.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions, with presence in high-performance computing .