STORE: Self-Provisioning Storage-as-a-Service for Serverless Functions

Abstract

Serverless computing provides on-demand elasticity, pay-per-use, and simplified deployment. However, serverless functions are typically stateless and depend on external storage services such as object stores or databases to exchange data or support stateful functions. Provisioning and configuring these storage systems still requires manual setup or declarative scripts, introducing complexity, slowing development, and increasing the risk of configuration errors. To address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce STORE, a self-provisioning storage architecture for serverless functions. STORE automatically selects the optimal storage backend and eliminates developer effort through zero-touch and zero-configuration provisioning, achieved by moving the self-provisioning logic to the platform level. Our evaluation results show that STORE reduces implementation effort by up to 84% compared to well-established Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks such as Terraform and Pulumi while maintaining low latency and linear scalability under realistic workloads, without introducing performance overhead.