Capybara: an Edge-Friendly Distributed Object Store for Diverse Serverless Functions

While originally designed for the cloud, the benefits of the serverless paradigm are also vital in Edge/Fog computing environments. This paper presents Capybara, a new scalable, programmable distributed object store for storing and sharing serverless function data objects (state) on edge infrastructures. The key innovations here are (1) achieving scalability and avoiding the significant DRAM cost of indexing metadata servers through a "game-theoretic" DHT-based P2P architecture; (2) providing edge users with a "programmable" handler abstraction to customize data management policies, such as different function image caching policies, warm container "keep-alive" durations, data access control methods, and data replication policies.