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1. Boki: Stateful Serverless Computing with Shared Logs

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3477132.3483541  

   Jia, Zhipeng; Witchel, Emmett (October 2021, Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 28th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles)

   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. 

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2. A fault-tolerance shim for serverless computing

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3342195.3387535  

   Sreekanti, Vikram; Wu, Chenggang; Chhatrapati, Saurav; Gonzalez, Joseph E.; Hellerstein, Joseph M.; Faleiro, Jose M. (April 2020, EuroSys '20: Proceedings of the Fifteenth European Conference on Computer Systems)

   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. 

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3. Fault-tolerant and Transactional Stateful Serverless Workflows

   Zhang, Haoran; Cardoza, Adney; Chen, Peter Baile; Angel, Sebastian; Liu, Vincent (November 2020, 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 20))

   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. 

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4. CausalMesh: A Causal Cache for Stateful Serverless Computing

   https://doi.org/10.14778/3704965.3704969  

   Zhang, Haoran; Mu, Shuai; Angel, Sebastian; Liu, Vincent (September 2024, Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment)

   Stateful serverless workflows consist of multiple serverless functions that access state on a remote database. Developers sometimes add a cache layer between the serverless runtime and the database to improve I/O latency. However, in a serverless environment, functions in the same workflow may be scheduled to different nodes with different caches, which can cause non-intuitive anomalies. This paper presents CausalMesh, a novel approach to causally consistent caching in serverless computing. CausalMesh is the first cache system that supports coordination-free and abort-free read/write operations and read transactions when clients roam among multiple servers. CausalMesh also supports read-write transactional causal consistency in the presence of client roaming, but at the cost of abort-freedom. Our evaluation shows that CausalMesh has lower latency and higher throughput than existing proposals. 

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5. CausalMesh: A Causal Cache for Stateful Serverless Computing

   Zhang, Haoran; Mu, Shuai; Angel, Sebastian; Liu, Vincent (August 2024, Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment)

   Stateful serverless workflows consist of multiple serverless functions that access state on a remote database. Developers sometimes add a cache layer between the serverless runtime and the database to improve I/O latency. However, in a serverless environment, functions in the same workflow may be scheduled to different nodes with different caches, which can cause non-intuitive anomalies. This paper presents CausalMesh, a novel approach to causally consistent caching in serverless computing. CausalMesh is the first cache system that supports coordination-free and abort-free read-/write operations and read transactions when clients roam among multiple servers. CausalMesh also supports read-write transactional causal consistency in the presence of client roaming, but at the cost of abort-freedom. Our evaluation shows that CausalMesh has lower latency and higher throughput than existing proposals. 

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