Doing More with Less - Orchestrating Serverless Applications without an Orchestrator

Explore a groundbreaking approach to serverless application orchestration in this conference talk from NSDI '23. Discover how application-level orchestration can replace standalone orchestrators, offering greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness while maintaining the same programming interfaces and execution guarantees. Learn about Unum, an innovative system that utilizes basic serverless components to achieve complex interactions and coordination among functions. Gain insights into how this approach can significantly reduce costs for both providers and users, potentially running up to 2x faster and costing 9x less than traditional solutions like AWS Step Functions. Delve into the technical details of Unum's intermediate representation, runtime library, and decentralized coordination mechanisms that leverage strongly consistent data stores. Understand the implications of this research for the future of serverless application development and deployment.