Serverless Runtime / Database Co-Design With Asynchronous I/O

Abstract

Minimizing database access latency is crucial in serverless edge computing for many applications, but databases are predominantly deployed in cloud environments, resulting in costly network round-trips. Embedding an in-process database library such as SQLite into the serverless runtime is the holy grail for low-latency database access. However, SQLite's architecture limits concurrency and multitenancy, which is essential for serverless providers, forcing us to rethink the architecture for integrating a database library. We propose rearchitecting SQLite to provide asynchronous byte-code instructions for I/O to avoid blocking in the library and decoupling the query and storage engines to facilitate database and serverless runtime co-design. Our preliminary evaluation shows up to a 100x reduction in tail latency, suggesting that our approach is conducive to runtime/database co-design for low latency.