BaaSLess: Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS)-enabled workflows in federated serverless infrastructures

Abstract

Serverless is a popular paradigm for expressing compute-intensive applications as serverless workflows. In practice, a significant portion of the computing is typically offloaded to various Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) cloud services. The recent rise of federated serverless and Sky computing offers cost and performance advantages for these BaaS-enabled serverless workflows. However, due to vendor lock-in and lack of service interoperability, many challenges remain that impact the development, deployment, and scheduling of BaaS-enabled serverless workflows in federated serverless infrastructures. This paper introduces BaaSLess - a novel platform that delivers global and dynamic federated BaaS to serverless workflows. BaaSLess provides: i) a novel SDK for uniform and dynamic access to federated BaaS services, reducing the complexity associated with the development of BaaS-enabled serverless workflows, ii) a novel globally-federated serverless BaaS framework that delivers a suite of BaaS-less ML services, including text-to-speech, speech-to-text, translation, and OCR, together with a globally-federated storage infrastructure, comprising AWS and Google cloud providers, and iii) a novel model and an algorithm for scheduling BaaS-enabled serverless workflows to improve their performance. Experimental results using three complementary BaaS-enabled serverless workflows show that BaaSLess improves workflow execution time by up to 2.95× compared to the state-of-the-art serverless schedulers, often at a lower cost.