State Migration in Styx: Towards Serverless Transactional Functions

Abstract Developing stateful cloud applications, such as low-latency workflows and microservices with strict consistency requirements, remains arduous for programmers. The Stateful Functions-as-a-Service (SFaaS) paradigm aims to serve these use cases. However, existing approaches provide weak transactional guarantees or perform expensive external state accesses requiring inefficient transactional protocols that increase execution latency. In this paper, we present Styx, a novel dataflow-based SFaaS runtime that executes serializable transactions consisting of stateful functions that form arbitrary call-graphs with exactly-once guarantees. Styx extends a deterministic transactional protocol by contributing: i) a function acknowledgment scheme to determine transaction boundaries required in SFaaS workloads, ii) a function-execution caching mechanism, and iii) an early-commit reply mechanism that substantially reduces transaction execution latency. In addition, Styx’s elasticity supports state migration for load balancing using scale-up and scale-down operations when workloads introduce uneven overhead among workers. Experiments with the YCSB, TPC-C, and Deathstar benchmarks show that Styx outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by achieving at least one order of magnitude higher throughput while exhibiting near-linear scalability and low latency. Moreover, state migration experiments with YCSB and TPC-C show that Styx’s approach to state migration outperforms the baseline, a stop and restart migration approach tailored to Styx, by adapting swiftly to workload changes while maintaining low latency.