Reducio: Optimized Confidential Serverless Cloud Deployments for Enterprise Customers

Abstract

Serverless platforms based on Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) have been recently proposed to address the privacy problems with serverless functions, while achieving low latency. Unfortunately, our study indicates that to achieve these properties, existing proposals impose non-trivial requirements in terms of infrastructure changes and platform memory. Reducio is an alternate serverless platform design that does not require infrastructure changes and significantly reduces platform memory requirements. The platform is designed using two key components: (1) a function isolation framework inside a CVM based on kernel deprivileging features that minimize infrastructure requirements, and (2) a layer-wise caching methodology and algorithm that effectively uses a small in-memory function cache. Our evaluation indicates that Reducio can significantly reduce both platform requirements for deployment and function memory consumption.