FUYAO: DPU-enabled Direct Data Transfer for Serverless Computing.

Serverless computing typically relies on the third-party forwarding method to transmit data between functions. This method couples control flow and data flow together, resulting in significantly slow data transmission speeds. This challenge makes it difficult for the serverless computing paradigm to meet the low-latency requirements of web services. To solve this problem, we propose decoupling the control flow from the data flow, enabling direct data transfer between functions. We introduce Fuyao, the first intermediate data transfer solution capable of reducing data transfer latency to the sub-millisecond level. Fuyao provides four different data transfer methods to cater to diverse data transfer requirements within or between nodes. For function pairs that communicate frequently, Fuyao builds a stateful direct connection between them, enabling rapid inter-function data exchange. We evaluate Fuyao using real-world representative benchmarks. Experimental results show that Fuyao outperforms state-of-the-art systems by up to 57x on latency.