Melding the Serverless Control Plane with the Conventional Cluster Manager for Speed and Compatibility

Modern serverless applications, often interactive with highly volatile traffic, challenge system scalability, demanding control planes that deliver low latency and cost efficiency. Analysis of production traces and existing systems reveals that current control plane designs (synchronous and asynchronous), particularly when built on conventional cluster managers like Kubernetes, struggle with this balance, often wasting significant CPU and memory resources on creating underutilized or idle instances. While clean-slate approaches like Dirigent offer performance gains, they sacrifice compatibility with established cluster management ecosystems. We introduce WaveLink, a serverless system designed to achieve high performance and low cost while maintaining compatibility with conventional cluster managers. WaveLink employs a novel dual-track control plane. A standard asynchronous track manages long-lived, full-featured regular instances for handling predictable, sustainable traffic, preserving full compatibility and feature sets off the critical path. Concurrently, an expedited parallel track addresses excessive traffic bursts that trigger cold starts. This fast path utilizes node-local agents (Wavelets) to rapidly spawn short-lived Emergency Instances with a reduced feature set, critically bypassing the latency overhead of the main cluster manager. Our experiments demonstrate that WaveLink, while remaining compatible with conventional managers for >98% invocation traffic, achieves 35% faster end-to-end performance at a comparable cost to the incompatible Dirigent system. WaveLink outperforms Kubernetes-compatible systems with synchronous control planes by 1.5-3.5x at 8-21% lower cost, and surpasses asynchronous counterparts by 1.7-3.5x at 3-33% lower cost.