PORTALS: Teleporting smart edge services to a serverless future

Objective
Our proposal is to develop a programming system called “Portals” that combines the built-in trust of cloud data stream processing and the flexibility of message-driven decentralized programming systems. The unique design of Portals enables the construction of systems composed of multiple services, each built in isolation, so atomic processing and data-protection rights are uniformly maintained. Portals’ innovative approach lies in encoding data ownership, processing atomicity within data in transit, and exposing them to the programmer as core programming elements, namely “atoms” and “portals”.  This will simplify complex systems engineering by multiple independent teams and enable a new form of serverless computing where any stateful service can be offered as a utility across cloud and edge.

Background
Enabling trust in distributed services is not an easy task. Trust comes in different forms and concrete challenges. For example, data systems can be trusted for their data-protection guarantees (e.g., GDPR), allowing users to access or delete their data or revoke access at any time. Trust can also be manifested in safety or consistency guarantees, enabling exactly-once processing semantics or serializable transactions. All such examples of implementing trust are extremely hard problems in practice that go way beyond the reach and expertise of system engineers, especially when implementing distributed services with multiple copies of the data being accessed simultaneously. Portals is a first-of-a-kind programming system that materializes all aspects of trust within its programming and execution model. Programs written in portals can scale and evolve while guaranteeing that all properties and invariants that manifest “trust” are constantly satisfied.

Another important driving need behind Portals is flexibility, accessibility and ease of use. A programming system is meant to simplify the work of its developers substantially. Serverless computing has been one of the rising concepts in cloud computing technologies in the last few years; that is, a model where developers can build and deploy their applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. However, current serverless platforms often have limitations regarding the types of applications that can be built and the ability to interface with persistent state. Portals aim to address these limitations by providing a message-driven decentralized programming system that allows developers to easily build and deploy a wide range of applications. The system’s unique design enables developers to focus on the business logic of their applications and the interdependencies while being oblivious to the decentralized underlying infrastructure or transactional mechanisms employed in the background.

Overall, Portals is a unique programming system that aims to simplify the work of developers while also enabling trust in distributed services. Its innovative approach combines the scalability, security and reliability of cloud data stream processing with the flexibility of actor programming systems. It enables a new form of serverless computing where any stateful service can be offered as a utility across cloud and edge environments.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
The researchers in the team represent the School of Electrical Engineering at KTH and the Computer Science and Digital Systems Division, Computer Systems Lab at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.

Watch the recorded presentation at the Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 event:

Portals Website: https://www.portals-project.org/