Portals: Teleporting smart edge services to a serverless future

Transcript

1. Digital Futures
   2023-09-05 1
   

   View Slide

2. Digital Futures
   PORTALS: Teleporting smart
   edge services to a serverless
   future
   Philipp Haller
   
   
   Associate Professor, EECS/TCS
   
   
   KTH Royal Institute of Technology
   2023-09-05 2
   

   View Slide

3. Project team
   Philipp Haller
   
   
   Associate Professor, KTH
   Paris Carbone
   
   
   Senior researcher, RISE
   
   
   Assistant Professor, KTH
   Jonas Spenger
   
   
   Researcher, RISE
   
   
   PhD student, KTH
   

   View Slide

4. Digital Futures
   Context: Large-Scale Data-Driven
   Services
   • Modern digital services leveraging large amounts of data are
   challenging to make trustful, reliable and scalable
   
   
   • Data privacy and reliability essential due to sensitivity of data
   
   
   • Scalability essential due to size of data or user base
   
   
   • Reliability and scalability requires constructing digital services as
   distributed systems
   
   
   • Tolerating faults (of compute nodes or the network)
   
   
   • Scaling compute and storage resources on demand
   2023-10-19 4
   

   View Slide

5. Digital Futures
   Challenges of Distributed Systems
   Building reliable and scalable distributed systems is challenging
   
   
   • Fault tolerance requires sophisticated distributed algorithms
   
   
   • Scalability requires complex concurrent programming
   
   
   • Data consistency may increase latency and reduce availability
   
   
   • Data-privacy legislation like GDPR is difficult to enforce
   
   
   • Dynamic updates or enhancements challenging
   2023-10-19 5
   

   View Slide

6. Digital Futures
   How to Handle these Challenges?
   • Various system architectures and programming frameworks have been
   proposed
   
   
   • The latest developments include Serverless Computing
   
   
   • Applications decomposed into functions that are invoked in
   response to events (FaaS — Function-as-a-Service)
   
   
   • Key innovation: allocate compute resources automatically → scale
   up and down (even to zero) according to demand
   
   
   • No manual provisioning of virtual machines → “serverless”
   
   
   • Partially addresses fault tolerance, scalability and dynamic updates
   2023-10-19 6
   

   View Slide

7. Digital Futures
   Challenges of Serverless
   Computing
   • Key aspects remain responsibilities of applications:
   
   
   • Challenge: enforcing strong data consistency on top of weak
   consistency provided by serverless framework
   
   
   • Challenge: data privacy
   
   
   • Added challenge: enforcing data-privacy legislation
   automatically
   
   
   • These are essential for trust and privacy
   2023-10-19 7
   

   View Slide

8. Digital Futures
   PORTALS: Objectives
   The objectives of the PORTALS project are to develop:
   
   
   • A decentralized serverless system architecture
   
   
   • Enabling deployment of “workflows” on the edge and in the cloud
   
   
   • A programming model to support a wide range of applications
   
   
   • Flexible inter-workflow communication via “portals”
   
   
   • Principled data processing via “atomic streams”
   
   
   • A formalization and a proof of execution guarantees and correctness
   
   
   • A prototype implementation enabling experimental evaluation and extension
   2023-10-19 8
   

   View Slide

9. Digital Futures
   Workflows
   • The units of computation: DAGs of stateful tasks
   
   
   • Consume and produce streams of events
   2023-10-19 9
   Work
   fl
   ow[T, U]
   src sink
   tasks
   AtomicStream[T] AtomicStream[U]
   

   View Slide

10. Digital Futures
    Atomic Processing Contract
    Data is processed through atomic (transactional) steps:
    
    
    1. Consume an atom (“batch of events”) from the input stream
    
    
    2. Process the entire atom
    
    
    3. Produce side effects (new events, state updates)
    2023-10-19 10
    Work
    fl
    ow[T, U]
    src sink
    tasks
    AtomicStream[T] AtomicStream[U]
    

    View Slide

11. Digital Futures
    Portals
    • A Portal exposes a dataflow as a service via bidirectional communication
    2023-10-19 11
    Responding
    Dataflow
    src tasks sink
    Requests Replies
    Portal Service
    Access
    Operator
    Reques8ng
    Dataflow
    Requests Replies
    Portal Service
    

    View Slide

12. Digital Futures
    Portals Open Source Project
    • A prototype implementation under active development
    
    
    • Open source, Apache 2.0 license
    
    
    • Written in Scala 3, a high-level language combining functional and
    object-oriented programming
    
    
    • Repository on GitHub:
    

    https://github.com/portals-project/portals
    2023-10-19 12
    

    View Slide

13. Digital Futures
    Portals Playground
    • The Portals playground enables running Portals-based applications in the
    web browser: portals-project.org/playground/
    
    
    • Made possible by compiling the Portals framework to JavaScript using
    Scala.js, the Scala-to-JavaScript compiler
    2023-10-05 13
    

    View Slide

14. Digital Futures
    Selected Publications
    • Spenger, Carbone, Haller. Portals: an Extension of Dataflow Streaming for Stateful
    Serverless. ACM SIGPLAN Onward! 2022
    

    https://doi.org/10.1145/3563835.3567664
    
    
    • Spenger, Huang, Haller, Carbone. Portals: A Showcase of Multi-Dataflow Stateful
    Serverless. PVLDB 16(12): 4054-4057 (2023)
    

    https://doi.org/10.14778/3611540.3611619
    
    
    • Spenger, Carbone, Haller: A Survey of Actor-Like Programming Models for Serverless
    Computing. Active Object Languages: Current Research Trends, Springer LNCS, to
    appear
    
    
    • Project website with all papers and talks:
    

    https://www.portals-project.org/
    2023-10-19 14
    

    View Slide

15. Digital Futures
    Thank you for
    listening
    2023-09-05 15
    

    View Slide