F3: An FPGA-accelerated FaaS Framework

FPGAs provide a programmable, energy-efficient, and compute-intensive acceleration substrate; thus, on the one hand, they offer a compelling solution for optimizing serverless workloads in cloud environments. On the other hand, FPGAs also introduce significant challenges that directly contradict the serverless model in the cloud, including their low-level and complex programming APIs, lack of virtualization and isolation mechanisms, high reconfiguration and communication overheads, and absence of orchestration mechanisms.