Towards a Function-as-a-Service Choreographic Programming Language: Examples and Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces FaaSChal, a choreographic programming language designed for serverless FaaS architectures, enabling correct-by-construction development and optimized deployment policies.

Contribution

It presents a novel CP language tailored for FaaS, with features like projection and a method to synthesize latency-minimizing policies respecting constraints.

Findings

Demonstrates FaaSChal with relevant examples

Shows how to extract infrastructural relations from choreographies

Proposes policies to minimize latency while respecting constraints

Abstract

Choreographic Programming (CP) is a language paradigm whereby software artefacts, called choreographies, specify the behaviour of communicating participants. CP is famous for its correctness-by-construction approach to the development of concurrent, distributed systems. In this paper, we illustrate FaaSChal, a proposal for a CP language tailored for the case of serverless Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). In FaaS, developers define a distributed architecture as a collection of stateless functions, leaving to the serverless platform the management of deployment and scaling. We provide a first account of a CP language tailored for the FaaS case via examples that present some of its relevant features, including projection. In addition, we showcase a novel application of CP. We use the choreography as a source to extract information on the infrastructural relations among functions so that we can synthesise policies that strive to minimise their latency while guaranteeing the respect of user-defined constraints.