Towards Serialization/Deserialization-free State Transfer in Serverless Workflows

Serialization and deserialization dominate the state transfer time of serverless workflows, leading to substantial performance penalties when executing various serverless workflow applications. We identify the key reason for serialization and deserialization as a lack of ability to efficiently access the (remote) memory of another function. To this end, we propose RMMap , an OS primitive for remote memory map, which allows a serverless function to directly access the memory of another function, even if it is located remotely. RMMap is the first to completely eliminate serialization and deserialization overhead when transferring states between any pairs of functions in (unmodified) serverless workflows. To make remote memory map efficient and feasible, we co-design it with modern networking (RDMA), OS, language runtime, and serverless platform. Evaluations using real-world serverless workloads show that integrating RMMap with Knative reduces the serverless workflow execution time on Knative by up to 2.6× and improves resource utilizations by 86.3%.