Kappa: a programming framework for serverless computing

Serverless computing has recently emerged as a new paradigm for running software on the cloud. In this paradigm, programs need to be expressed as a set of short-lived tasks, each of which can complete within a short bounded time (e.g., 15 minutes on AWS Lambda). Serverless computing is beneficial to cloud providers---by allowing them to better utilize resources---and to users---by simplifying management and enabling greater elasticity. However, developing applications to run in this environment is challenging, requiring users to appropriately partition their code, develop new coordination mechanisms, and deal with failure recovery. In this paper, we propose Kappa, a framework that simplifies serverless development. It uses checkpointing to handle lambda function timeouts, and provides concurrency mechanisms that enable parallel computation and coordination.