FaasKeeper: a Blueprint for Serverless Services

FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) brought a fundamental shift into cloud computing: (persistent) virtual machines have been replaced with dynamically allocated resources, trading locality and statefulness for a pay-as-you-go model more suitable for varying and infrequent workloads. However, adapting services to function within the serverless paradigm while still fulfilling requirements is challenging. In this work, we introduce a design blueprint for creating complex serverless services and contribute a set of requirements for efficient and scalable FaaS computing. To showcase our approach, we focus on ZooKeeper, a centralized coordination service that offers a safe and wait-free consensus mechanism but requires a persistent allocation of computing resources that does not offer the flexibility needed to handle variable workloads. We design FaaSKeeper, the first coordination service built on serverless functions and cloud-native services. FaaSKeeper provides the same consistency guarantees and interface as ZooKeeper with a price model proportional to the activity in the system. In addition, we define synchronization primitives to extend the capabilities of scalable cloud storage ser- vices with consensus semantics needed for strong data consistency.