skip to main content


Title: Boki: Stateful Serverless Computing with Shared Logs
Boki is a new serverless runtime that exports a shared log API to serverless functions. Boki shared logs enable stateful serverless applications to manage their state with durability, consistency, and fault tolerance. Boki shared logs achieve high throughput and low latency. The key enabler is the metalog, a novel mechanism that allows Boki to address ordering, consistency and fault tolerance independently. The metalog orders shared log records with high throughput and it provides read consistency while allowing service providers to optimize the write and read path of the shared log in different ways. To demonstrate the value of shared logs for stateful serverless applications, we build Boki support libraries that implement fault-tolerant workflows, durable object storage, and message queues. Our evaluation shows that shared logs can speed up important serverless workloads by up to 4.7x.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2008321
NSF-PAR ID:
10357172
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 28th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
Page Range / eLocation ID:
691 to 707
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    Serverless computing has grown in popularity in recent years, with an increasing number of applications being built on Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms. By default, FaaS platforms support retry-based fault tolerance, but this is insufficient for programs that modify shared state, as they can unwittingly persist partial sets of updates in case of failures. To address this challenge, we would like atomic visibility of the updates made by a FaaS application. In this paper, we present aft, an atomic fault tolerance shim for serverless applications. aft interposes between a commodity FaaS platform and storage engine and ensures atomic visibility of updates by enforcing the read atomic isolation guarantee. aft supports new protocols to guarantee read atomic isolation in the serverless setting. We demonstrate that aft introduces minimal overhead relative to existing storage engines and scales smoothly to thousands of requests per second, while preventing a significant number of consistency anomalies. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    This paper introduces Beldi, a library and runtime system for writing and composing fault-tolerant and transactional stateful serverless functions. Beldi runs on existing providers and lets developers write complex stateful applications that require fault tolerance and transactional semantics without the need to deal with tasks such as load balancing or maintaining virtual machines. Beldi’s contributions include extending the log-based fault-tolerant approach in Olive (OSDI 2016) with new data structures, transaction protocols, function invocations, and garbage collection. They also include adapting the resulting framework to work over a federated environment where each serverless function has sovereignty over its own data. We implement three applications on Beldi, including a movie review service, a travel reservation system, and a social media site. Our evaluation on 1,000 AWS Lambdas shows that Beldi’s approach is effective and affordable. 
    more » « less
  3. The FuzzyLog is a partially ordered shared log abstraction. Distributed applications can concurrently append to the partial order and play it back. FuzzyLog applications obtain the benefits of an underlying shared log --- extracting strong consistency, durability, and failure atomicity in simple ways --- without suffering from its drawbacks. By exposing a partial order, the FuzzyLog enables three key capabilities for applications: linear scaling for throughput and capacity (without sacrificing atomicity), weaker consistency guarantees, and tolerance to network partitions. We present Dapple, a distributed implementation of the FuzzyLog abstraction that stores the partial order compactly and supports efficient appends / playback via a new ordering protocol. We implement several data structures and applications over the FuzzyLog, including several map variants as well as a ZooKeeper implementation. Our evaluation shows that these applications are compact, fast, and flexible: they retain the simplicity (100s of lines of code) and strong semantics (durability and failure atomicity) of a shared log design while exploiting the partial order of the FuzzyLog for linear scalability, flexible consistency guarantees (e.g., causal+ consistency), and network partition tolerance. On a 6-node Dapple deployment, our FuzzyLogbased ZooKeeper supports 3M/sec single-key writes, and 150K/sec atomic cross-shard renames. 
    more » « less
  4. The FuzzyLog is a partially ordered shared log abstraction. Distributed applications can concurrently append to the partial order and play it back. FuzzyLog applications obtain the benefits of an underlying shared log - extracting strong consistency, durability, and failure atomicity in simple ways - without suffering from its drawbacks. By exposing a partial order, the FuzzyLog enables three key capabilities for applications: linear scaling for throughput and capacity (without sacrificing atomicity), weaker consistency guarantees, and tolerance to network partitions. We present Dapple, a distributed implementation of the FuzzyLog abstraction that stores the partial order compactly and supports efficient appends / playback via a new ordering protocol. We implement several data structures and applications over the FuzzyLog, including several map variants as well as a ZooKeeper implementation. Our evaluation shows that these applications are compact, fast, and flexible: they retain the simplicity (100s of lines of code) and strong semantics (durability and failure atomicity) of a shared log design while exploiting the partial order of the FuzzyLog for linear scalability, flexible consistency guarantees (e.g., causal+ consistency), and network partition tolerance. On a 6-node Dapple deployment, our FuzzyLog-based ZooKeeper supports 3M/sec single-key writes, and 150K/sec atomic cross-shard renames. 
    more » « less
  5. The shared log paradigm is at the heart of modern distributed applications in the growing cloud computing industry. Often, application logs must be stored durably for analytics, regulations, or failure recovery, and their smooth operation depends closely on how the log is implemented. Scalog is a new implementation of the shared log abstraction that offers an unprecedented combination of features for continuous smooth delivery of service: Scalog allows applications to customize data placement, supports reconfiguration with no loss in availability, and recovers quickly from failures. At the same time, Scalog provides high throughput and total order. The paper describes the design and implementation of Scalog and presents examples of applications running upon it. To evaluate Scalog at scale, we use a combination of real experiments and emulation. Using 4KB records, a 10 Gbps infrastructure, and SSDs, Scalog can totally order up to 52 million records per second. 
    more » « less