João Rafael Pinto Soares
An Architecture to Offer Transactional Strong Consistency for FaaS Applications
Tese submetida para provas de mestrado em Engenharia
Informática e de Computadores Instituto Superior
Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa.
Abstract
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a relatively recent paradigm supported
by many cloud providers that supports the execution of applications
without prior allocation of servers. Applications are written as a
composition of stateless functions, organized in a graph. Different
functions may execute in different servers, that are provisioned
automatically by the cloud provider. Functions may read and write
from/to stable storage using a storage service of their choice. For
cost/efficiency reasons, most FaaS applications use storage services
that cannot provide strong consistency to functions executing in
different servers. In this thesis we study efficient ways of extending
a weakly consistent data store with additional services that can
offer transactional support and strong consistency (namely, snapshot
isolation) to FaaS applications. Some previous works that aim at
achieving the same goals force all storage read- /write requests to be
forwarded to one or more consistency servers, that are responsible for
ensuring that a consistent version of the data is returned to the
functions. In this work we propose and evaluate a different strategy,
where functions read optimistically from storage and use the
consistency servers to obtain metadata that is used to check if the
version returned by the storage system is consistent. This strategy
decreases the load on the consistency server, improving the
scalability of the system. Our experimental evaluation shows that our
solution offers 1.4× higher throughput then alternative protocols,
while using only 5% of their resources.
Publicações
- An Architecture to Offer Transactional Strong Consistency for FaaS Applications
- João Rafael Pinto Soares
- MSc Thesis. Instituto Superior Técnico,
Universidade de Lisboa.
- November 2021.
- Available BibTeX, MSC Thesis, and extended abstract, and
mid-term
report.
- Uma Arquitectura para Oferecer Garantias de
Coerência forte a Aplicações FaaS.
- R. Soares and L. Rodrigues
- Actas do décimo segundo
Simpósio de Informática (Inforum), Lisboa, Portugal,
Sep. 2021.
-
- Available BibTeX, extended report
(pdf).
- FaaSTCC: Efficient Transactional Causal Consistency
for Serverless Computing.
- T. Lykhenko, R. Soares
and L. Rodrigues.
- Proceedings of the 22nd ACM/IFIP International
Middleware Conference, Virtual Event, Canada, December 2021.
Luís Rodrigues