Enoki: Stateful Distributed FaaS from Edge to Cloud

TL;DR

Enoki is a novel architecture that enables stateful FaaS functions across edge and cloud by integrating a replicated key-value store, maintaining low latency and the FaaS abstraction.

Contribution

Enoki introduces a replicated key-value store integrated with FaaS to support stateful applications across edge and cloud environments.

Findings

Enoki achieves low-latency local data access for stateful functions.

The prototype successfully supports distributed stateful FaaS applications.

Microbenchmark results demonstrate performance benefits of Enoki.

Abstract

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a promising paradigm for applications distributed across the edge-cloud continuum. FaaS functions are stateless by nature, leading to high elasticity and transparent invocation. Supporting stateful applications, however, requires integrating data storage in FaaS, which is not trivial in an edge-cloud environment. We propose Enoki, an architecture for stateful FaaS computing replicated across the edge-cloud continuum. Enoki integrates a replicated key-value store with single-node FaaS systems at edge and cloud nodes in order to provide low-latency local data access for functions without breaking the abstraction of the FaaS programming model. We evaluate Enoki with microbenchmarks on an open-source prototype and demonstrate building a stateful FaaS application with multiple functions distributed over edge and cloud.