CWASI: A WebAssembly Runtime Shim for Inter-function Communication in the Serverless Edge-Cloud Continuum

Abstract

Serverless Computing brings advantages to the Edge-Cloud continuum, like simplified programming and infrastructure management. In composed workflows, where serverless functions need to exchange data constantly, serverless platforms rely on remote services such as object storage and key-value stores as a common approach to exchange data. In WebAssembly, functions leverage WebAssembly System Interface to connect to the network and exchange data via remote services. As a consequence, co-located serverless functions need remote services to exchange data, increasing latency and adding network overhead. To mitigate this problem, in this paper, we introduce CWASI: a WebAssembly OCI-compliant runtime shim that determines the best inter-function data exchange approach based on the serverless function locality. CWASI introduces a three-mode communication model for the Serverless Edge-Cloud continuum. This communication model enables CWASI Shim to optimize inter-function communication for co-located functions by leveraging the function host mechanisms. Experimental results show that CWASI reduces the communication latency between the co-located serverless functions by up to 95% and increases the communication throughput by up to 30x.