Roadrunner: Accelerating Data Delivery to WebAssembly-Based Serverless Functions

TL;DR

Roadrunner is a sidecar shim that enables near-zero copy, serialization-free data transfer between WebAssembly serverless functions, significantly reducing latency and improving throughput.

Contribution

We introduce Roadrunner, a novel sidecar shim that minimizes data transfer overhead in WebAssembly serverless functions by enabling near-zero copy, serialization-free communication.

Findings

Reduces inter-function communication latency by up to 89%

Achieves 97% reduction in serialization overhead

Increases throughput by 69 times

Abstract

Serverless computing provides infrastructure management and elastic auto-scaling, therefore reducing operational overhead. By design serverless functions are stateless, which means they typically leverage external remote services to store and exchange data. Transferring data over a network typically involves serialization and deserialization. These operations usually require multiple data copies and transitions between user and kernel space, resulting in overhead from context switching and memory allocation, contributing significantly to increased latency and resource consumption. To address these issues, we present Roadrunner, a sidecar shim that enables near-zero copy and serialization-free data transfer between WebAssembly-based serverless functions. Roadrunner reduces the multiple copies between user space and kernel space by mapping the function memory and moving the data along a dedicated virtual data hose, bypassing the costly processes of serialization and deserialization. This approach reduces data movement overhead and context switching, achieving near-native latency performance for WebAssembly-based serverless functions. Our experimental results demonstrate that Roadrunner significantly improves the inter-function communication latency from 44% up to 89%, reducing the serialization overhead in 97% of data transfer, and increasing throughput by 69 times compared to state-of-the-art WebAssembly-based serverless functions.