A Serverless Approach to Publish/Subscribe Systems

Abstract

Building reliable and scalable publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems require tremendous development efforts. The serverless paradigm simplifies the development and deployment of highly available applications by delegating most of the operational concerns to the cloud providers. The serverless paradigm describes a programming model, where the developers break the application downs into smaller microservices which run on the cloud in response to events. In this paper, we propose a design of a serverless pub/sub system based on the Amazon Web Services Lambdas and Microsoft Azure Functions. Our pub/sub system performs topic-based, content-based and function-based matchings. The function-based matching is a novel matching approach where the subscribers can define highly customizable subscription function which the broker applies to the publications in the cloud. We also provide an evaluation application for investigating the scalability of the designed brokers on different serverless platforms.