CODE: Code once, deploy everywhere serverless functions in federated FaaS

Kurzfassung

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) frameworks empower developers to swiftly define and provision their infrastructure with a single click. However, the domain-specific languages (DSLs) utilized for coding the infrastructure often lean towards provider specificity rather than being application-centric. This results in increased developer effort, as they are compelled to duplicate data when deploying serverless functions across diverse regions and providers within federated FaaS environments. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce CODE, a framework engineered to streamline the deployment of functions in federated FaaS settings. CODE facilitates automatic deployment directly from the storage of any provider, eliminating the need for additional development effort to upload or copy deployment packages between disparate providers. Aligned with the guiding principle of “code once, deploy everywhere”, CODE adopts a three-level hierarchy: function -> providers -> cloud regions. This architectural approach dramatically reduces the lines of code (LoC) in IaC scripts by up to 9.23x when contrasted with prevailing IaC frameworks such as Terraform and Serverless Framework. Additionally, CODE’s unified storage interface slashes LoC by up to 81.8%, both within CODE itself and when coding functions that use storage from providers such as AWS and GCP. In our comprehensive evaluation, we assessed the correlation between deployment package size and deployment time for various functions within a real-world serverless workflow across four regions of AWS and GCP. Our findings indicate that AWS deployment packages are significantly larger, often in the tens of megabytes, compared to GCP. Despite the larger size, AWS deploys these packages up to 6x faster than GCP.