Interactive Tool Open Source

Serv-Drishti

An interactive visualisation and simulation tool for serverless computing internals. Watch requests traverse your architecture in real-time, analyse cold-start patterns, compare scheduling strategies in Battleground Mode, and export metrics — all in the browser without any backend.

JavaScript Docker

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenFaaS

Live Demo GitHub

Features

What Serv-Drishti Offers

Interactive Visual Simulation

Watch requests travel through your serverless architecture in real-time with animated flow visualisation and dynamic function pod states.

Comprehensive Analytics

Multiple Chart.js-powered panels for throughput, latency, resource utilisation, cold-start frequency, and detailed metrics tables.

Battleground Mode

Compare routing strategies and placement algorithms side-by-side with synchronised workload injection and head-to-head performance analysis.

Educational Design

Designed for computer science courses, workshops (Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing), and conference demonstrations of serverless concepts.

Highly Configurable

Tune routing strategies, placement algorithms, auto-scaling parameters, concurrency limits, and function warm-up behaviour through a live control panel.

Data Export

Export simulation runs as CSV, JSON, or PNG chart snapshots for inclusion in papers, reports, and slide decks.

Design

Architecture

Core Layer

Chart management, simulation engine, and placement algorithm implementations (round-robin, least-loaded, idle-first, random). All logic runs client-side with no server dependency.

UI Layer

Notification system, live configuration panel, and event handling for user-driven parameter changes during an active simulation run.

Feature Modules

Battleground testing module orchestrates dual-simulation runs with the same seed workload. Export module serialises in-memory simulation state to CSV/JSON/PNG.

Deployment

Static HTML/CSS/JS bundle served via Docker (nginx). Kubernetes-deployable with a single manifest. No external API calls or persistent storage required.

Applications

Use Cases

Academic Education

Used in Distributed Systems (COMP90015) and Cloud Computing courses at the University of Melbourne. Gives students hands-on intuition for scheduling and autoscaling trade-offs.

Research Demonstrations

Deployed as a companion demo to the DRe-SCale and Saarthi research papers — shows real-time scheduling decisions under synthetic workload traces at conference presentations.

Enterprise Training

Onboard new team members and demonstrate cold-start impact, concurrency limits, and scale-to-zero behaviour to engineering stakeholders without needing a live cluster.

Stack

Technical Implementation

Core Technologies

Vanilla JavaScript (modular ES6+ architecture, no frameworks)
Chart.js for performance and analytics visualisations
Docker (nginx) for containerised deployment
Kubernetes-deployable with a single manifest file

Simulation Capabilities

Multiple routing strategies (round-robin, least-loaded, idle-first)
Auto-scaling simulation with configurable thresholds
Cold-start modelling with configurable warm-up latency
Real-time performance metrics and CSV/JSON/PNG export

Research

Publication

IEEE ITNAC 2025 · Published

Serv-Drishti: An Interactive Serverless Function Request Simulation Engine and Visualiser

Agarwal, S. et al. — IEEE International Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference

View on IEEE Xplore