Serverless, or Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS), is an increasingly popular paradigm for application development,
\nas it provides implicit elastic scaling and load based billing. However, the weak execution guarantees and
\nintrinsic compute-storage separation of FaaS create serious challenges when developing applications that
\nrequire persistent state, reliable progress, or synchronization. This has motivated a new generation of serverless
\nframeworks that provide stateful abstractions. For instance, Azure\u2019s Durable Functions (DF) programming
\nmodel enhances FaaS with actors, workflows, and critical sections.
\nAs a programming model, DF is interesting because it combines task and actor parallelism, which makes
\nit suitable for a wide range of serverless applications. We describe DF both informally, using examples, and
\nformally, using an idealized high-level model based on the untyped lambda calculus. Next, we demystify
\nhow the DF runtime can (1) execute in a distributed unreliable serverless environment with compute-storage
\nseparation, yet still conform to the fault-free high-level model, and (2) persist execution progress without
\nrequiring checkpointing support by the language runtime. To this end we define two progressively more
\ncomplex execution models, which contain the compute-storage separation and the record-replay, and prove
\nthat they are equivalent to the high-level model.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Serverless, or Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS), is an increasingly popular paradigm for application development, as it provides implicit elastic scaling and load based billing. However, the weak execution guarantees and intrinsic compute-storage separation of FaaS create serious challenges when developing applications that require persistent state, reliable progress, or synchronization. This has motivated a new generation of serverless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13560],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-782968","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"ACM","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2021-10","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/DF-Semantics-Final.pdf","id":"783025","title":"df-semantics-final","label_id":"243109","label":0},{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/DF-Semantics-With-Proofs.pdf","id":"783022","title":"df-semantics-with-proofs","label_id":"243103","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[{"id":783025,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/DF-Semantics-Final.pdf"},{"id":783022,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/DF-Semantics-With-Proofs.pdf"},{"id":783004,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/oopsla21main-p153-p-135a76dd1b-54093-final.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sebastian Burckhardt","user_id":33544,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Sebastian Burckhardt"},{"type":"text","value":"Chris Gillum","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"David Justo","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Konstantinos Kallas","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Connor McMahon","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Christopher S. Meiklejohn","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199565],"msr_event":[851368],"msr_group":[144812],"msr_project":[],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/782968"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/782968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":783028,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/782968\/revisions\/783028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-content-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-content-type?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-product-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-product-type?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-platform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-platform?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-download-source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-download-source?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=782968"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=782968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}