Towards a Message Broker Free FaaS for Distributed Dataflow Applications

We present an extended implementation of Dyninka, a framework to prototype FaaS-based distributed dataflow applications. Its programming model gathers the definition and the composition of services within a single file using the multi-tier programming paradigm, and compiles them into multiple services to be deployed on cloud computing infrastructure. Our framework is built without a gateway or a messaging platform. Services communicate directly with each other within the cloud abstracted infrastructure. As a result, we emancipate ourselves from message brokers and reduce the network and computation overheads introduced by other FaaS frameworks such as OpenFaaS. We validated our approach on a Fog computing scenario with limited resources and several load profiles. Our framework shows better stability, throughput, and a reduced overhead compared to OpenFaaS.