Optimizing FaaS Platforms for MCP-enabled Agentic Workflows

TL;DR

This paper introduces FAME, a serverless architecture for MCP-enabled agentic workflows that improves scalability, reduces latency and costs, and manages context persistence effectively in cloud environments.

Contribution

FAME leverages FaaS functions and orchestrates them for agentic workflows, addressing state management and deployment challenges in serverless platforms.

Findings

Up to 13x latency reduction

88% fewer input tokens

66% cost savings

Abstract

Agentic workflows that use autonomous AI Agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers is rapidly rising. This introduces challenges in scalable cloud deployment and state management. Traditional hosting on Virtual Machines (VMs) is resource-intensive and lacks elasticity. Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms offer modularity, autoscaling and cost efficiency but are inherently stateless. In this paper, we present the FAME, a FaaS-based architecture for orchestrating MCP-enabled agentic workflows. FAME decomposes agentic patterns such as ReAct into composable agents: Planner, Actor and Evaluator, that are each a FaaS function built using LangGraph and are orchestrated as a FaaS workflow. This enables modular composition as AWS Step Functions and avoids function timeouts seen for monolithic agentic workflows. To address context persistence across user requests in a conversation, FAME automates agent memory persistence and injection using DynamoDB. It also optimizes MCP server deployment through AWS Lambda wrappers, caches tool outputs in S3 and proposes function fusion strategies. We evaluate FAME on two representative applications, on research paper summarization and log analytics, under diverse memory and caching configurations. Results show up to 13x latency reduction, 88% fewer input tokens and 66% in cost savings, along with improved workflow completion rates. This demonstrates the viability of serverless platforms for hosting complex, multi-agent AI workflows at scale.