The rapid adoption of serverless computing necessitates a deeper understanding of its underlying operational mechanics, particularly concerning request routing, cold starts, function scaling, and resource management. This paper presents Serv-Drishti, an interactive, open-source simulation tool designed to demystify these complex behaviours. Serv-Drishti simulates and visualises the journey of a request through a representative serverless platform, from the API Gateway and intelligent Request Dispatcher to dynamic Function Instances on resource-constrained Compute Nodes. Unlike simple simulators, Serv-Drishti provides a robust framework for comparative analysis. It features configurable platform parameters, multiple request routing and function placement strategies, and a comprehensive failure simulation module. This allows users to not only observe but also rigorously analyse system responses under various loads and fault conditions. The tool generates real-time performance graphs and provides detailed data exports, establishing it as a valuable resource for research, education, and the design analysis of serverless architectures.
@article{arxiv.2511.17518,
title = {Serv-Drishti: An Interactive Serverless Function Request Simulation Engine and Visualiser},
author = {Siddharth Agarwal and Maria A. Rodriguez and Rajkumar Buyya},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.17518},
year = {2025}
}