Unifying serverless and microservice tasks with SigmaOS
Reading group: Antony Costa Do Amaral presented "Unifying serverless and microservice tasks with SigmaOS" (SOSP'24) at 1A312 the 14/11/2025 at 10h30.
Abstract
Many cloud applications use both serverless functions, for bursts of stateless parallel computation, and container orchestration, for long-running microservices and tasks that need to interact. Ideally a single platform would offer the union of these systems’ capabilities, but neither is sufficient to act as that single platform: serverless functions are lightweight but cannot act as servers with long-term state, while container orchestration offers general-purpose computation but instance start-up takes too long to support burst parallelism.σ S is a new multi-tenant cloud operating system that combines the best of container orchestration and serverless in one platform with one API. σ OS computations, called procs, can be long-running, stateful, and interact with each other, making them a good match for both serverless and microservice tasks. A key aspect of the σ OS design is its cloud-entricAPI, which provides flexible management of computation, a novel abstraction for communication endpoints, σ EPs— which allow procs of a tenant to communicate efficiently but prohibits procs from sending packets to other tenants—and a flexible naming system to name, for example, σ EPs. Quick proc start-up is important for serverless uses. A key enabling observation is that both serverless and microservice applications rely on cloud services for much of the work traditionally done by the local OS (e.g., access to durable storage and additional compute resources). σ OS exploits this observation by providing only a small and generic local operating system image to each proc, which can be created much more quickly than a container orchestration instance since σ OS need not install application-specific filesystem content or (due to σ OS’s σ EPs) configure an isolated overlay network.
