SandPiper: A Cost-Efficient Adaptive Framework for Online Recommender Systems

Online recommender systems have proven to have ubiquitous applications in various domains. To provide accurate recommendations in real time it is imperative to constantly train and deploy models with the latest data samples. This retraining involves adjusting the model weights by incorporating newly-arrived streaming data into the model to bridge the accuracy gap. To provision resources for the retraining, typically the compute is hosted on VMs, however, due to the dynamic nature of the data arrival patterns, stateless functions would be an ideal alternative over VMs, as they can instantaneously scale on demand. However, it is non-trivial to statically configure the stateless functions because the model retraining exhibits varying resource needs during different phases of retraining. Therefore, it is crucial to dynamically configure the functions to meet the resource requirements, while bridging the accuracy gap. In this paper, we propose Sandpiper, an adaptive framework that leverages stateless functions to deliver accurate predictions at low cost for online recommender systems. The three main ideas in Sandpiper are (i) we design a data-drift monitor that automatically triggers model retraining at required time intervals to bridge the accuracy gap due to incoming data drifts; (ii) we develop an online configuration model that selects the appropriate function configurations while maintaining the model serving accuracy within the latency and cost budget; and (iii) we propose a dynamic synchronization policy for stateless functions to speed up the distributed model retraining leading to cloud cost minimization. A prototype implementation on AWS shows that Sandpiper maintains the average accuracy above 90%, while 3.8× less expensive than the traditional VM-based schemes.