funcX: A Federated Function Serving Fabric for Science

Exploding data volumes and velocities, new computational methods and platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity demand new approaches to computation in the sciences. These new approaches must enable computation to be mobile, so that, for example, it can occur near data, be triggered by events (e.g., arrival of new data), be offloaded to specialized accelerators, or run remotely where resources are available. They also require new design approaches in which monolithic applications can be decomposed into smaller components, that may in turn be executed separately and on the most suitable resources. To address these needs we present funcX---a distributed function as a service (FaaS) platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function execution. funcX's endpoint software can transform existing clouds, clusters, and supercomputers into function serving systems, while funcX's cloud-hosted service provides transparent, secure, and reliable function execution across a federated ecosystem of endpoints. We motivate the need for funcX with several scientific case studies, present our prototype design and implementation, show optimizations that deliver throughput in excess of 1 million functions per second, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that funcX can scale to more than more than 130000 concurrent workers.Comment: Accepted to ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2020). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.0490

Secure FaaS orchestration in the fog: how far are we?

AbstractFunction-as-a-Service (FaaS) allows developers to define, orchestrate and run modular event-based pieces of code on virtualised resources, without the burden of managing the underlying infrastructure nor the life-cycle of such pieces of code. Indeed, FaaS providers offer resource auto-provisioning, auto-scaling and pay-per-use billing at no costs for idle time. This makes it easy to scale running code and it represents an effective and increasingly adopted way to deliver software. This article aims at offering an overview of the existing literature in the field of next-gen FaaS from three different perspectives: (i) the definition of FaaS orchestrations, (ii) the execution of FaaS orchestrations in Fog computing environments, and (iii) the security of FaaS orchestrations. Our analysis identify trends and gaps in the literature, paving the way to further research on securing FaaS orchestrations in Fog computing landscapes

Serverless protocols for inventory and tracking with a UAV

It is widely acknowledged that the proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) may lead to serious concerns regarding avionics safety, particularly when end-users are not adhering to air safety regulations. There are, however, domains in which UAVs may help to increase the safety of airplanes and the management of flights and airport resources that often require substantial human resources. For instance, Paris Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG) has more than 7,000 staff and supports 30,000 direct jobs for more than 60 million passengers per year (as of 2016). Indeed, these new systems can be used beneficially for several purposes, even in sensitive areas like airports. Among the considered applications are those that suggest using UAVs to enhance safety of on-ground airplanes; for instance, by collecting (once the aircraft has landed) data recorded by different systems during the flight (like the sensors of the Aircraft Data Networks - ADN) or by examining the state of airplane structure. In this paper, our proposal is to use UAVs, under the control of the airport authorities, to inventory and track various tagged assets, such as luggage, supplies required for the flights, and maintenance tools. The aim of our proposal is to make airport management systems more efficient for operations requiring inventory and tracking, along with increasing safety (sensitive assets such as refueling tanks, or sensitive pieces of luggage can be tracked), thus raising financial profit.Comment: 11 pages, Conference, The 36th IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC'17

Beyond Microbenchmarks: The SPEC-RG Vision for a Comprehensive Serverless Benchmark

Serverless computing services, such as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), hold the attractive promise of a high level of abstraction and high performance, combined with the minimization of operational logic. Several large ecosystems of serverless platforms, both open- and closed-source, aim to realize this promise. Consequently, a lucrative market has emerged. However, the performance trade-offs of these systems are not well-understood. Moreover, it is exactly the high level of abstraction and the opaqueness of the operational-side that make performance evaluation studies of serverless platforms challenging. Learning from the history of IT platforms, we argue that a benchmark for serverless platforms could help address this challenge. We envision a comprehensive serverless benchmark, which we contrast to the narrow focus of prior work in this area. We argue that a comprehensive benchmark will need to take into account more than just runtime overhead, and include notions of cost, realistic workloads, more (open-source) platforms, and cloud integrations. Finally, we show through preliminary real-world experiments how such a benchmark can help compare the performance overhead when running a serverless workload on state-of-the-art platforms