Deserv: Decentralized Serverless Computing

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.