The less server architecture for cloud functions

Abstract

Serverless execution model is becoming an increasingly prominent choice to host data processing applications. In this event-based model, predefined stateless functions are triggered for execution on an event when new data becomes available. We make two critical observations in this framework - first, data sources in the serverless framework are largely-consistent, causing lot of data duplication, and second, stateless functions are deterministic, i.e., they compute same result on multiple applications of duplicate data. Leveraging these two insights in this work, we introduce Sanity, a novel storage de-duplication framework for serverless platform that not only performs data de-duplication but also de-duplicates events to avoid redundant execution of stateless functions. This helps improve overall throughput of the serverless platform through execution of mostly unique functions. We present the design of Sanity for a continuous container vulnerability check use-case and discuss its performance implications.