Cloudburst is a stateful Functions-as-a-Service platform built on top of Anna. Cloudburst has all the benefits of a standard serverless FaaS system like AWS Lambda: no operational overheads, seamless autoscaling, and disaggregated infrastructure. However, inspired by our recent work on the shortcoming of existing serverless systems, Cloudburst focuses on enabling new applications to take advantage of serverless infrastructure by focusing on enabling smart state management. We accomplish this with a new design principle: logical disaggregation with physical colocation. While compute and storage are logically separate services, Cloudburst introduces state caches that live on the same physical machines as compute workers to reduce data transfer costs.

Combined with smart scheduling techniques and state-of-the-art consistency protocols, this principle allows Cloudburst to scale seamlessly with workloads while improving performance over AWS Lambda by two orders of magnitude. Cloudburst also provides cleaner state semantics (repeatable read, causal consistency) than commodity cloud infrastructure. You can learn more in our VLDB 20 paper.