Transactions and Serverless are Made for Each Other.

Serverless cloud platforms, such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, are widely used for stateless applications due to their simplicity and scalability. This article explores how extending serverless platforms to support database transactions could unlock their potential for stateful, database-backed...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 67; no. 12; pp. 52 - 57
Main Authors: Li, Qian, Kraft, Peter
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Dec2024
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: Transactions and Serverless are Made for Each Other.
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          Li, Qian
          Kraft, Peter
        affil: DBOS, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA
      su:
        Cloud computing
        Electronic commerce
        Online banking
        Electronic data processing
        Debugging
        Distributed computing
      sug:
        subj:
          Cloud computing
          Electronic commerce
          Online banking
          Electronic data processing
          Debugging
          Distributed computing
      ab: Serverless cloud platforms, such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, are widely used for stateless applications due to their simplicity and scalability. This article explores how extending serverless platforms to support database transactions could unlock their potential for stateful, database-backed applications, including e-commerce and banking systems. By wrapping functions in transactions, these platforms can enable features like time-travel debugging and reliable execution with "exactly-once" semantics, addressing common challenges in distributed systems. Such advancements could significantly enhance debugging, reliability, observability, and performance for modern enterprise applications.
      pubtype: Periodical
      doctype: Article
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    language: English
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          year: 2024
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