UKFaaS: Lightweight, High-Performance and Secure FaaS Communication With Unikernel
Zhenqian Chen, Y. H. Zhan, Peng Hu, Xinkui Zhao, Muyu Yang, Siwei Tan, Lufei Zhang, Liqiang Lu, Jianwei Yin, Zuoning Chen · IEEE Transactions on Computers · 2025
Unikernel is a promising runtime for serverless computing with its lightweight and isolated architecture. It offers a secure and efficient environment for applications. However, famous serverless frameworks like Knative have introduced heavyweight component sidecars to assist function instance deployment in a non-intrusive manner. But the sidecar not only hinders the throughput of unikernel function services but also consumes excessive memory resources. Moreover, the intricate network communication pathways among various services pose significant challenges for deploying unikernels in production serverless environments. Although shared-memory based communication on the same server can solve the communication bottleneck of unikernel-based function instances. The situation where malicious programs on the server make the shared memory untrustworthy limits the deployment of such technologies.We propose UKFaaS, a lightweight and high-performance serverless framework. UKFaaS leverages the advantages of customized operating systems through unikernel and it non-intrusively integrates sidecar functionality into the unikernel, avoiding the overhead of sidecar request forwarding. Additionally, UKFaaS innovatively implements data communication between unikernels in the same server to eliminate VM-Exit bottlenecks in RPC (remote process call) based on VMFUNC without relying on memory sharing. The preliminary experimental results indicate that UKFaaS can realize 1.8×-3.5× request throughput per second (RPS) compared with the advanced serverless system FaasFlow, UaaF and Nightcore in the Google online boutique microservice benchmark.