Reliable Transactions in Serverless-Edge Architecture

Modern edge applications demand novel solutions where edge applications do not have to rely on a single cloud provider (which cannot be in the vicinity of every edge device) or dedicated edge servers (which cannot scale as clouds) for processing compute-intensive tasks. A recent computing philosophy, Sky computing, proposes giving each user ability to select between available cloud providers.

In this paper, we present our serverless-edge co-design, which extends the Sky computing vision. In our serverless-edge codesign, we expect edge devices to collaborate and spawn required number of serverless functions. This raises several key challenges: (1) how will this collaboration take place, ( 2) what if some edge devices are compromised, and ( 3) what if a selected cloud provider is malicious. Hence, we design SERVERLESSBFT, the first protocol to guarantee Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) transactional flow between edge devices and serverless functions. We present an exhaustive list of attacks and their solutions on our serverless-edge co-design. Further, we extensively benchmark our architecture on a variety of parameters.