Capability-Based Efficient Data Transmission Mechanism for Serverless Computing

Serverless computing has gained widespread popularity due to its rapid deployment, elastic scaling, and pay-as-you-go advantages. Large-scale pipeline applications designed for big data processing, video analytics, and machine learning are gradually evolving toward the serverless architecture. However, the inefficiency of large data transmission among functions has limited the further adoption of the serverless paradigm in these applications. With the emergence of capability Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), the multi-tenant security isolation model and data transmission methods in the cloud have ushered in new opportunities. This paper proposes Hummer, an efficient communication and data transmission scheme based on the capability ISA. The capability ISA allows multiple functions to run in separate isolation domains in a single address space. Function instances can efficiently share memory by directly passing hardware capabilities. This paper extends the CHERI capability ISA, introducing the novel shared capability and shared capability store tracking (SCST) mechanism to manage the shared memory access rights, enabling a zero-copy communication mechanism. We compare Hummer with existing communication mechanisms and show that it improves data transmission rate by 6 – 40 ×. Redis implemented with Hummer APIs doubles its throughput.