Decentralized Edge FaaS

Abstract

The project explores the creation of a decentralized network for hosting serverless functions using a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture. The primary motivation is to enable individuals and small cloud service providers to offer computational resources for executing and deploying serverless functions, thereby decentralizing the control currently held by major cloud providers. The evaluation of the distributed computing capabilities of the network is another key aspect of the project. The system leverages OpenFaaS for function deployment and execution, and Rust for implementing the P2P network. The network uses a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to store and locate functions, allowing any node to route requests to the appropriate node hosting the function. This setup facilitates distributed computing tasks by enabling the distribution of function executions across multiple nodes. The project explains the process of designing and building the system prototype. It includes deploying OpenFaaS in a Kubernetes cluster and implementing the P2P network using the rust-libp2p library. Validation and evaluation are conducted through experiments simulating network nodes in virtual machines, focusing on function routing, execution time, performance, and distributed manycall requests. The results demonstrate the system’s capability to deploy and route execution of functions across the net- work in addition to carry out distributed computations over different nodes. This research opens posibilities for further exploration in fault tolerance, security, and real-world deploy- ment scenarios, contributing to the advancement of decentralized infrastructure services and distributed computing at the edge.