FaasRS: Remote Sensing Image Processing System on Serverless Platform

Big data processing is now the primary mission in remote sensing processing, fortunately, cloud computing provides a feasible approach to perform it efficiently. But the work of resource provisioning, scheduling, and scaling is still inevitable in most cloud computing solutions, it poses a considerable challenge to data analyst. The emerging serverless architecture presents a new paradigm to provide a cloud service, the user only needs to upload function codes and leaves all the other server management jobs to the service provider. It reveals a new possibility of remote sensing processing. This paper presents FaasRS, a framework to process remote sensing images upon serverless platform. FaasRS is built on AWS Lambda, it exposes only simple APIs to operate images, and builds DAG for user's algorithm. FaasRS splits task by splitting the image into small tiles based on geospatial region, and uses each Lambda worker to perform the computation for one tile. To reduce the redundant operations, we also make optimizations based on the algorithm DAG. FaasRS shows favorable performance and scalability in our evaluation. In the comparison with Spark and Ray, FaasRS shows a significant performance improvement in different type of RS processing jobs.