Stateful Function as a Service at the Edge

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. Abstract—In Function as a Service (FaaS), users invoke remote functions, which encapsulate service(s). These functions typically need to remotely access a persistent state via external services: this makes the paradigm less attractive in edge systems, especially for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, due to the increased delay and outbound traffic. We propose to generalize the FaaS paradigm by allowing functions to alternate between remotestate and local-state phases, depending on internal and external conditions, and dedicating a container with persistent memory to functions when in a local-state phase. We present initial results showing that this simple yet powerful pattern allows to better utilize the available resources, which are scarce on edge nodes, while significantly reducing tail latencies, which is key to enable many new applications based on real-time Machine Learning (ML), e.g., in smart vehicles and smart factory scenarios.