Faasm - Lightweight Isolation for Efficient Stateful Serverless Computing

Explore a conference talk from USENIX ATC '20 that introduces Faasm, a novel approach to serverless computing. Delve into the concept of Faaslets, a lightweight isolation abstraction that enables efficient stateful serverless computing. Learn how Faaslets utilize software-fault isolation through WebAssembly to allow memory sharing between functions in the same address space, reducing data movement costs. Discover how the Faasm runtime isolates resources using Linux cgroups and provides a low-level POSIX host interface. Examine the performance benefits of Faasm compared to container-based platforms, including faster machine learning model training, improved inference throughput, and reduced tail latency. Gain insights into the challenges of serverless computing for big data processing and how Faasm addresses them through its innovative architecture.

Introduction
Background
Challenges
Protophaselites
Shared Memory
PushPull
Serialization
Evaluation
Comparison
Network Transfers
Benchmarks
Summary