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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 themetalog, 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 4.2 ×. 

The shared log approach has emerged as an attractive state management option for distributed systems. A shared log not only serves as persistent, strongly consistent, and faulttolerant storage, its ability to provide a total order enables fine-grained state machine replication. Boki is a recent shared log system that includes an intuitive LogBook abstraction and novel shared log design choices. Despite Boki being designed as storage for serverless functions, its design principals are applicable to other distributed systems that disaggregate storage from compute. 

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. 

The microservice architecture is a popular software engineering approach for building flexible, large-scale online services. Serverless functions, or function as a service (FaaS), provide a simple programming model of stateless functions which are a natural substrate for implementing the stateless RPC handlers of microservices, as an alternative to containerized RPC servers. However, current serverless platforms have millisecond-scale runtime overheads, making them unable to meet the strict sub-millisecond latency targets required by existing interactive microservices. We present Nightcore, a serverless function runtime with microsecond-scale overheads that provides container-based isolation between functions. Nightcore’s design carefully considers various factors having microsecond-scale overheads, including scheduling of function requests, communication primitives, threading models for I/O, and concurrent function executions. Nightcore currently supports serverless functions written in C/C++, Go, Node.js, and Python. Our evaluation shows that when running latency-sensitive interactive microservices, Nightcore achieves 1.36×–2.93× higher throughput and up to 69% reduction in tail latency.