research-article

The serverless trilemma: function composition for serverless computing

Authors:

Stephen J. Fink,

Vinod Muthusamy,

Philippe Suter,

Olivier TardieuAuthors Info & Claims

Onward! 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software

Pages 89 - 103

https://doi.org/10.1145/3133850.3133855

Published: 25 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The field of serverless computing has recently emerged in support of highly scalable, event-driven applications. A serverless application is a set of stateless functions, along with the events that should trigger their activation. A serverless runtime allocates resources as events arrive, avoiding the need for costly pre-allocated or dedicated hardware.

While an attractive economic proposition, serverless computing currently lags behind the state of the art when it comes to function composition. This paper addresses the challenge of programming a composition of functions, where the composition is itself a serverless function.

We demonstrate that engineering function composition into a serverless application is possible, but requires a careful evaluation of trade-offs. To help in evaluating these trade-offs, we identify three competing constraints: functions should be considered as black boxes; function composition should obey a substitution principle with respect to synchronous invocation; and invocations should not be double-billed.

Furthermore, we argue that, if the serverless runtime is limited to a reactive core, i.e. one that deals only with dispatching functions in response to events, then these constraints form the serverless trilemma. Without specific runtime support, compositions-as-functions must violate at least one of the three constraints.

Finally, we demonstrate an extension to the reactive core of an open-source serverless runtime that enables the sequential composition of functions in a trilemma-satisfying way. We conjecture that this technique could be generalized to support other combinations of functions.

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Mallellu SMaheswari V. Aluvalu RKantipudi M(2024)Function as a Service (FaaS) for Fast, Efficient, Scalable SystemsServerless Computing Concepts, Technology and Architecture10.4018/979-8-3693-1682-5.ch008(134-151)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2024
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Segarra CDurev IPietzuch P(2024)Is It Time To Put Cold Starts In The Deep Freeze?Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698527(259-268)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
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Index Terms

The serverless trilemma: function composition for serverless computing
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Distributed systems organizing principles
        Cloud computing
        Organizing principles for web applications

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cover image ACM Conferences

Onward! 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software

October 2017

261 pages

ISBN:9781450355308

DOI:10.1145/3133850

Program Chairs:
Emina Torlak
University of Washington, USA
,
Tijs van der Storm
CWI, Netherlands / University of Groningen, Netherlands
,
Robert Biddle
Carleton University, Canada

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

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Published: 25 October 2017

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SPLASH '17: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 25 - 27, 2017

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-1682-5.ch008
Zanevych O(2024)ADVANCING WEB DEVELOPMENT: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MODERN FRAMEWORKS FOR REST AND GRAPHQL BACK-END SERVICESGrail of Science10.36074/grail-of-science.15.03.2024.031(216-228)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.36074/grail-of-science.15.03.2024.031
Segarra CDurev IPietzuch P(2024)Is It Time To Put Cold Starts In The Deep Freeze?Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698527(259-268)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698038.3698527
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Escaleira PCunha VBarraca JGomes DAguiar R(2024)MoFaaS: A Moving Target Defense Approach to Fortify Functions as a Service2024 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)10.1109/ISCC61673.2024.10733628(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
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