SCOOP: A Scalable Object-Oriented Serverless Platform

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) has been the primary component to drive the movement toward serverless computing. These lightweight and scalable components, though attractive, are non-trivial to accommodate the needs of long-running stateful applications. In this paper, we highlight the drawbacks of existing stateful FaaS proposals, in turn motivating the need to rethink the stateful serverless model for building general-purpose applications, while maintaining its benefits such as auto-scaling and pay-per-use cost model. We present a novel serverless model based on the object-oriented (OO) programming paradigm, with Object-as-a-Service (OaaS), acting as the only component of the serverless design. Through our experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that the proposed architecture, named SCOOP, can improve the end-to-end latency of applications by 52% and 58%, compared to the state-of-the-art stateless and stateful FaaS implementations, respectively, while reducing the SLO violations by up to 14% by scaling resources based on the traffic fluctuations in the WITS and Berkeley traces.