Object as a Service: Simplifying Cloud-Native Development through Serverless Object Abstraction

TL;DR

This paper introduces Object as a Service (OaaS), a new paradigm that encapsulates data and functions into cloud objects, simplifying cloud-native development by reducing data management burdens and enabling reuse and dataflow semantics.

Contribution

It proposes the OaaS paradigm, inspired by OOP, integrating access control, inheritance, and dataflow support into serverless computing, and develops the Oparaca platform to realize this concept.

Findings

Oparaca provides structured and unstructured data abstraction with consistency.

OaaS reduces development overhead and improves scalability.

The platform demonstrates minimal overhead compared to existing solutions.

Abstract

The function-as-a-service (FaaS) paradigm is envisioned as the next generation of cloud computing systems that mitigate the burden for cloud-native application developers by abstracting them from cloud resource management. However, it does not deal with the application data aspects. As such, developers have to intervene and undergo the burden of managing the application data, often via separate cloud storage services. To further streamline cloud-native application development, in this work, we propose a new paradigm, known as Object as a Service (OaaS) that encapsulates application data and functions into the cloud object abstraction. OaaS relieves developers from resource and data management burden while offering built-in optimization features. Inspired by OOP, OaaS incorporates access modifiers and inheritance into the serverless paradigm that: (a) prevents developers from compromising the system via accidentally accessing underlying data; and (b) enables software reuse in cloud-native application development. Furthermore, OaaS natively supports dataflow semantics. It enables developers to define function workflows while transparently handling data navigation, synchronization, and parallelism issues. To establish the OaaS paradigm, we develop a platform named Oparaca that offers state abstraction for structured and unstructured data with consistency and fault-tolerant guarantees. We evaluated Oparaca under real-world settings against state-of-the-art platforms with respect to the imposed overhead, scalability, and ease of use. The results demonstrate that the object abstraction provided by OaaS can streamline flexible and scalable cloud-native application development with an insignificant overhead on the underlying serverless system.