A Shared Memory Approach for Function Chaining in Serverless Platforms
Andrea Sabbioni, Lorenzo Rosa, Armir Bujari, Luca Foschini, Antonio Corradi · 2021 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC) · 2021
Serverless platforms are increasingly gaining importance in the cloud computing landscape due to their benefit of shortening the time to market of solutions and capability of automatic, fast, fine-grained scaling of resources. In this context, function chaining represents an appealing feature, allowing the composition of two or more functions to create a complex computation from simpler units while incentivizing modularity and reusability of functions. In this paper, we propose a portable and transparent, container-based serverless architecture that introduces an innovative infrastructural support, enabling an efficient composition of functions co-located on the same host. The proposal relies on a shared-memory approach and a message-oriented middleware serving as a communication medium among components. The experimental assessment shows the approach comes with the benefit of optimized resource usage and performance benefits measured in terms of request completion rate and a decrease in response latency.