Network-assisted Capability Management for Distributed Execution Environments

The increasing demand for scalable and efficient cloud computing solutions has led to the widespread adoption of Funtion as a Service (FaaS) environments. This research addresses the challenges associated with sharing stateless functions and performance and resource utilization in FaaS by introducing an in-network capability system as an authentication layer between functions. Previous work has various bottlenecks introduced by the capability-based access model. This research proposes offloading all capability tracking into P4-programmable Intel Tofino switches and describes a capability-based access protocol.

This work includes implementing the protocol and a simple FaaS runtime using the protocol. The evaluation of this proof-of-concept implementation shows that the central switch can accelerate the communication-heavy operations in distributed capability systems.

(Diploma Thesis defense)