Deserv : Decentralized Serverless Computing

Christie V, Samuel H. and Chopra, Amit K. and Singh, Munindar P. (2021) Deserv : Decentralized Serverless Computing. In: 2021 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS) :. 2021 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS) . IEEE, pp. 51-60. ISBN 9781665416825

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Abstract

A decentralized application involves multiple autonomous principals, e.g., humans and organizations. Autonomy motivates (i) specifying a decentralized application via a protocol that captures the interactions between the principals, and (ii) a programming model that enables each principal to independently (from other principals) construct its own protocol-compliant agent. An agent encodes its principal's decision making and represents it in the application. We contribute Deserv, the first protocol-based programming model for decentralized applications that is suited to the cloud. Specifically, Deserv demonstrates how to leverage function-as-a-service (FaaS), a popular serverless programming model, to implement agents. A notable feature of Deserv is the use declarative protocols to specify interactions. Declarative protocols support implementing stateful agents in a manner that naturally exploits the concurrency and autoscaling benefits offered by serverless computing.