Rethinking the Networking Stack for Serverless Environments: A Sidecar Approach

Abstract

Serverless platforms rely onlegacy networking stacks for communication and data movement. We quantitatively analyze the performance of these stacks and show their mismatch with highly consolidated, virtualized modern serverless environments, focusing on Firecracker, the most common serverless virtualization framework. As serverless applications grow in complexity and interaction, the resulting network bottleneck is a prime source of user-perceived, end-to-end latency. In this paper, we present a detailed vision of a new, sidecar-based networking stack for serverless environments. Our primary design goal is to provide low-overhead networking while maintaining existing security guarantees. We outline the research challenges in both the control and the data plane that the community needs to tackle before such a sidecar architecture can be used in practice.