Dirigo: Self-scaling Stateful Actors For Serverless Real-time Data Processing

Abstract: We propose Dirigo, a distributed stream processing service built atop virtual actors. Dirigo achieves both a high level of resource efficiency and performance isolation driven by user intent (SLO). To improve resource efficiency, Dirigo adopts a serverless architecture that enables time-sharing of compute resources among streaming operators, both within and across applications. Meanwhile, Dirigo improves performance isolation by inheriting the property of function autoscaling from serverless architecture. Specifically, Dirigo proposes (i) dual-mode actor, an actor abstraction that dynamically provides orderliness guarantee for streaming operator during autoscaling and (ii) a data plane scheduling mechanism, along with its API, that allows scheduling and scaling at the message-level granularity.