Abstract

Modern cloud developers face many distributed systems complexities when building disaggregated applications from cloud building blocks. We propose a new class of systems, called Serverless State Management Systems (SSMS), that abstracts away these complexities and transparently manages fault-tolerance, deployment, and scaling of a logical cloud application on physical cloud resources. An SSMS, analogous to a DBMS, provides three important abstractions for disaggregated applications: 1) a logical application model, similar to relational algebra, that describes application semantics but abstracts away the deployment details, 2) strong resilient programming primitives, similar to ACID transactions, that simplifies fault-tolerant programming in the cloud, and 3) smart, cost-based optimization schemes that automates scheduling, placement, and other details, similar to a query optimizer. We present a preliminary design for SSMS and associated research challenges.