ChestBox: Enabling Fast State Sharing for Stateful Serverless Computing With State Functions

This paper presents ChestBox, a novel approach that utilizes <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">state functions</i> to facilitate low-latency state sharing for stateful serverless computing. When an <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">application function</i> needs to share a state, the state function creates a memory space with Linux's shared memory object to store the state. Other application functions can then read the state directly from the shared memory. ChestBox enables fast state sharing that avoids excessive memory overhead without compromising on-demand resource allocation compared to existing solutions. This effectively reduces the energy consumption of serverless computing and promotes sustainable computing. The implementation of ChestBox on Apache OpenWhisk unearths two major implementation challenges, which we address with respective optimization techniques, i.e., state function channel and state swapping. The evaluation of ChestBox with four real-world applications shows that compared with the state-of-the-art approach, it can reduce state-sharing latency by up to 99.71%, while reducing execution costs by 24.59% and storage costs by 99.76%.