Adopting the Actor Model for Antifragile Serverless Architectures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach using the actor model to enhance antifragility in serverless architectures by implementing supervision strategies and stressor-based predictive analysis.

Contribution

It proposes a new framework for integrating supervision strategies and stressor-based analysis within serverless systems to foster antifragility, a concept not previously explored in this context.

Findings

Improved system resiliency through stressor injection

Enhanced antifragility properties in serverless architectures

Increased complexity balanced with robustness

Abstract

Antifragility is a novel concept focusing on letting software systems learn and improve over time based on sustained adverse events such as failures. The actor model has been proposed to deal with concurrent computation and has recently been adopted in several serverless platforms. In this paper, we propose a new idea for supporting the adoption of supervision strategies in serverless systems to improve the antifragility properties of such systems. We define a predictive strategy based on the concept of stressors (e.g., injecting failures), in which actors or a hierarchy of actors can be impacted and analyzed for systems' improvement. The proposed solution can improve the system's resiliency in exchange for higher complexity but goes in the direction of building antifragile systems.