Faasm

Faasm is a high-performance stateful serverless runtime.

Faasm provides multi-tenant isolation, yet allows functions to share regions of memory. These shared memory regions give low-latency concurrent access to data, and are synchronised globally to support large-scale parallelism across multiple hosts.

Faasm combines software fault isolation from WebAssembly with standard Linux tooling, to provide security and resource isolation at low cost. Faasm runs functions side-by-side as threads of a single runtime process, with low overheads and fast boot times.

Faasm defines a custom host interface that extends WASI to include function inputs and outputs, chaining functions, managing state, accessing the distributed filesystem, dynamic linking, pthreads, OpenMP and MPI.

Our paper from Usenix ATC '20 on Faasm can be found here.

Please see the full documentation for more details on the code and architecture.

Quick start

Update submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Start a Faasm cluster locally using docker compose:

docker compose up -d --scale worker=2 nginx

To compile, upload and invoke a C++ function using this local cluster you can use the faasm/cpp container:

docker compose run cpp /bin/bash

# Compile the demo function
inv func demo hello

# Upload the demo "hello" function
inv func.upload demo hello

# Invoke the function
inv func.invoke demo hello

For more information on next steps you can look at the getting started docs

Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825184 (CloudButton), the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) award 1973141, and a gift from Intel Corporation under the TFaaS project.