  Along with the rise of domain-specific computing (ASICs hardware) and
domain-specific programming languages, we envision that the next step is the
emergence of domain-specific cloud platforms. Developing such platforms for
popular applications in the serverless manner, not only can offer a higher
efficiency to both users and providers, it can also expedite the application
development cycles and enable users to become solution-oriented and focus on
their specific business logic. Considering multimedia streaming as one of the
most trendy applications in the IT industry, the goal of this study is to
develop SMSE, the first domain-specific serverless platform for multimedia
streaming. SMSE democratizes multimedia service development via enabling
content providers (or even end-users) to rapidly develop their desired
functionalities on their multimedia contents. Upon developing SMSE, the next
goal of this study is to deal with its efficiency challenges and develop a
function container provisioning method that can efficiently utilize cloud
resources and improve the users' QoS. In particular, we develop a dynamic
method that provisions durable or ephemeral containers depending on the
spatiotemporal and data-dependency characteristics of the functions. Evaluating
the prototype implementation of SMSE under real-world settings demonstrates its
capability to reduce both the containerization overhead, and the makespan time
of serving multimedia processing functions (by up to 30%) in compare to the
function provision methods that are being used in the general-purpose
serverless cloud systems.
