Transactional Causal Consistency for Serverless Computing

We consider the setting of serverless Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms, where storage services are disaggregated from the machines that support function execution. FaaS applications consist of compositions of functions, each of which may run on a separate machine and access remote storage.

The challenge we address is improving I/O latency in this setting while also providing application-wide consistency. Previous work has explored providing causal consistency for individual I/Os by carefully managing the versions stored in a client-side data cache. In our setting, a single application may execute multiple functions across different nodes, and therefore issue interrelated I/Os to multiple distinct caches. This raises the challenge of Multisite Transactional Causal Consistency (MTCC): the ability to provide causal consistency for all I/Os within a given transaction even if it runs across multiple physical sites. We present protocols for MTCC implemented in a system called HydroCache. Our evaluation demonstrates orders-of-magnitude performance improvements due to caching, while also protecting against consistency anomalies that otherwise arise frequently.