DeFaaS: Decentralized Function-as-a-Service for Emerging dApps and Web3

Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Nour Diallo, Lin Chen, Weidong Shi

Abstract: Function-as-a-service (FaaS) is an emerging computation architecture, which provides high scalability and flexibility. All the existing F aaS systems are owned and managed by a single cloud service provider. While this is not an issue for most existing enterprise applications, such character is not compatible with the decentralization principle of dApp/Web3 applications, more of which are being deployed in the cloud environment. Therefore, there is an urgent need to build a decentralized FaaS, which is managed by multiple cloud service providers and allows a decentralized application to take advantages of FaaS. In this research paper, we propose DeFaaS, a novel system for managing decentralized FaaS using blockchain technology and decentralized API management, where functions are executed on a distributed network of nodes by multi-cloud data centers, rather than on a centralized server. This allows for greater scalability and flexibility, as well as improved security and reliability.