GNuggies: A proposal for hosting resilient stateless services using untrusted nodes

This thesis outlines a proposal for a serverless cloud compute system hosted on untrusted nodes. We call this proposed system “GNuggies”. It is designed to feel instantly familiar to existing serverless offerings such as AWS Lambda or Azure Cloud Functions. The key difference between GNuggies and existing offerings is that GNuggies proposes leveraging spare compute resources by allowing anyone to contribute nodes into the system. These contributed nodes must be treated as untrusted and this is where the bulk this thesis’s contributions arise: 1. A proposed architecture that adapts well understood Distributed Systems concepts to situations involving untrusted nodes and to run in the absence of central authorities. 2. A proposed system wherein actors choose to contribute spare compute and are effectively incentivized to do so. 3. An incentive structure that makes actors less willing to behave in a malicious manner. This thesis discusses the methods to be used and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses. It also argues that decentralized serverless is a direction that the internet will potentially benefit from moving towards.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Agarwal, Harshit

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gupta, Indranil

• Distributed systems
• distributed computing
• grid computing
• public cloud
• incentive mechanism
• crowdsourced cloud
• serverless computing
• untrusted machines
• web services
• censorship
• volunteer compute

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2018 Harshit Agarwal

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101062

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/101062