WebAssembly and V8 isolate-based approach for serverless computing architecture

Abstract

User have the flexibility to execute short-lived applications with the help of serverless computing frameworks without concern about load balancing by scaling zero to large- scale traffic and further without considering configuring platform and runtime software, etc. Stateless containers are used in existing serverless platforms to isolate functions by preventing memory sharing directly with other serverless functions. Duplicating and serialising data repeatedly per new user request hit on the server by invoking VMs and containers leads to high performance and resource usage. The necessity of a light-weighted isolation approach is required to overcome these issues. We introduce WebAssembly and Chrome V8 isolate based, a new isolation mechanism for serverless computing. This isolates the memory of each function using linear memory with software fault isolation (SFI), which is a portable low-level bytecode called WebAssembly (which major browser vendors have collaboratively designed). The proposed runtime for serverless functions uses Chrome V8 Isolate-based isolation and virtualizes file systems with a similar approach to POSIX host interfaces using WebAssembly System Interface (WASI). WebAssembly (Wasm) and Chrome V8- based software fault isolation have been proposed in the study as an alternative method for conventional container-based serverless approaches, with near-native speed, a small memory footprint compared to containers, and optimised invocation time. WebAssembly-based isolation is compared against the container-based approach to validate its applicability within the study