A Fault-Tolerance Shim for Serverless Computing

Abstract

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.