Cloud Monads

A novel concept for monadic abstraction over state in serverless cloud applications

Master thesis (2022)

Authors

J.T. Eysbach Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

Jan S. Rellermeyer Data-Intensive Systems - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
Lydia Y. Chen Data-Intensive Systems - EEMCS (supervisor 2)
B.P. Ahrens Programming Languages - EEMCS (supervisor 2)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2022 Jelle Eysbach
Cloud Monads Serverless FaaS
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Published Date

27-05-2022

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Serverless computing is a relatively recent paradigm that promises fine-grained billing and ease-of-use by abstracting away cloud infrastructure for developers. There is an increasing interest in using the serverless paradigm to execute data analysis tasks. Serverless functions often interact with external services, which can be considered similar to the concept of side-effects in regular programming. Haskell uses monads to isolate side-effects and to structure the composition of functions using side-effects. This thesis explores whether the concept of the monad can be applied in a serverless computing environment, ideally in a way that is flexible with regards to platform. An abstraction of side-effects was developed in the form of a monadic layer that is added to serverless functions. The monadic layer interacts with monads using an interface and exposes the API of the monads to the user. A monadic implementation was also created for a platform-independent function composition mechanism using orchestrator functions. An implementation of a shared state side-effect has also been created as a practical use-case for the monadic layer, and to explore the usability of monads on platforms with more restricted composition frameworks. The implementations are evaluated on performance, expressiveness and usability.