Histrio: a Serverless Actor System

Abstract: In recent years, the serverless paradigm has been widely adopted to develop cloud applications, as it enables building scalable solutions while delegating operational concerns such as infrastructure management and resource provisioning to the serverless provider. Despite bringing undisputed advantages, the serverless model requires a change in programming paradigm that may add complexity in software development. In particular, in the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm, functions are inherently stateless. As a consequence, developers carry the burden of directly interacting with external storage services and handling concurrency and state consistency across function invocations. This results in less time spent on solving the actual business problems they face. Moving from these premises, this paper proposes Histrio, a programming model and execution environment that simplifies the development of complex stateful applications in the FaaS paradigm. Histrio grounds on the actor programming model, and lifts concerns such as state management, database interaction, and concurrency handling from developers. It enriches the actor model with features that simplify and optimize the interaction with external storage. It guarantees exactly-once-processing consistency, meaning that the application always behaves as if any interaction with external clients was processed once and only once, masking failures. Histrio has been compared with a classical FaaS implementation to evaluate both the development time saved due to the guarantees the system offers and the applicability of Histrio in typical applications. In the evaluated scenarios, Histrio simplified the implementation by significantly removing the amount of code needed to handle operational concerns. It proves to be scalable and it provides configuration mechanisms to trade performance and execution costs.