DIFFUSE: A DIstributed and decentralized platForm enabling Function composition in Serverless Environments

Serverless computing is an emerging proposition in the cloud offering landscape that promotes a higher level of abstraction, further decoupling software operations from the underlying hardware. Often recognized as an economically driven computational approach, the serverless model relies on the execution of short-lived stateless functions, enabling a fine-grained accounting and control of resources. In this context, function composition represents an appealing feature, allowing the composition of two or more functions to create tailored processing pipelines, incentivizing modularity and reusability of functions, while paving the way to application-specific run-time optimizations. This work presents DIFFUSE: a DIstributed and decentralized platForm enabling Function composition in Serverless Environments. DIFFUSE embodies an innovative infrastructural support, enabling the efficient and transparent composition of functions by relying on pluggable middleware support, serving as a conveyor of messages among the platform components. Broadening the deployment spectrum of our proposal, we assess different middleware solutions, each presenting distinct delivery profiles, evidencing the tradeoffs that emerge.