YuanRong: A Production General-purpose Serverless System for Distributed Applications in the Cloud

We design, implement, and evaluate YuanRong, the first production general-purpose serverless platform with a unified programming interface, multi-language runtime, and a distributed computing kernel for cloud-based applications. YuanRong addresses many limitations of existing Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) systems, particularly in performance and lack of important features. First, our fast function system supports sub-millisecond function invocation and locality-aware hierarchical scheduling. Second, our multi-semantic built-in data system achieves object exchange latency of 200 microseconds, enabling end-to-end latency of 2 milliseconds for streaming elements at 5Gbps throughput. Third, the extensible, portable Service Bridge bridges stateless and stateful operations, allowing connection reuse and distributed transactions, and offers unified backend abstraction for multi-cloud portability. YuanRong has been deployed for over 3 years at Huawei across nearly 20 datacenter regions, processing up to 30 billion requests per day on more than 100,000 CPU cores, with a daily average CPU usage of 53%. It serves various serverless workloads, including enhanced FaaS services, microservices, data analytics, deep model training and serving, and some HPC workloads. Our experience shows that Spring-based microservices can be migrated to YuanRong within one day, reducing resource costs by 90%, demonstrating its generality and efficiency in supporting a broad spectrum of applications.