Pawissanutt Lertpongrujikorn

Pawissanutt Lertpongrujikorn, Juahn Kwon, Hai Duc Nguyen et al.

The rise of complex, latency-sensitive IoT applications across the Edge-Cloud continuum exposes the limitations of current Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms in seamlessly addressing the complexity, heterogeneity, and intermittent connectivity of Edge-Cloud environments. Developers are left to manage integration and Quality of Service (QoS) enforcement manually, rendering application development complicated and costly. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the EdgeWeaver platform that offers a unified "object" abstraction that is seamlessly distributed across the continuum to encapsulate application logic, state, and QoS. EdgeWeaver automates "class" deployment across edge and cloud by composing established distributed algorithms (e.g., Raft, CRDTs)-enabling developers to declaratively express QoS (e.g., availability and consistency) desires that, in turn, guide internal resource allocation, function placement, and runtime adaptation to fulfill them. We implement a prototype of EdgeWeaver and evaluate it under diverse settings and using human subjects. Results show that EdgeWeaver boosts development productivity by 31%, while declaratively enforcing strong consistency and achieving 9 nines availability, 10,000X higher than the current standard, with negligible performance impact.

Tapajit Chandra Paul, Pawissanutt Lertpongrujikorn, Hai Duc Nguyen et al.

Asynchronous messaging is a cornerstone of modern distributed systems, enabling decoupled communication for scalable and resilient applications. Today's message queue (MQ) ecosystem spans a wide range of designs, from high-throughput streaming platforms to lightweight protocols tailored for edge and IoT environments. Despite this diversity, choosing an appropriate MQ system remains difficult. Existing evaluations largely focus on throughput and latency on fixed hardware, while overlooking CPU and memory footprint and the effects of resource constraints, factors that are critical for edge and IoT deployments. In this paper, we present a systematic performance study of eight prominent message brokers: Mosquitto, EMQX, HiveMQ, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ Artemis, NATS Server, Redis (Pub/Sub), and Zenoh Router. We introduce mq-bench, a unified benchmarking framework to evaluate these systems under identical conditions, scaling up to 10,000 concurrent client pairs across three VM configurations representative of edge hardware. This study reveals several interesting and sometimes counter-intuitive insights. Lightweight native brokers achieve sub-millisecond latency, while feature-rich enterprise platforms incur 2-3X higher overhead. Under high connection loads, multi-threaded brokers like NATS and Zenoh scale efficiently, whereas the widely-deployed Mosquitto saturates earlier due to its single-threaded architecture. We also find that Java-based brokers consume significantly more memory than native implementations, which has important implications for memory-constrained edge deployments. Based on these findings, we provide practical deployment guidelines that map workload requirements and resource constraints to appropriate broker choices for telemetry, streaming analytics, and IoT use cases.

Akiharu Esashi, Pawissanutt Lertpongrujikorn, Shinji Kato et al.

Function as a Service (FaaS) is poised to become the foundation of the next generation of cloud systems due to its inherent advantages in scalability, cost-efficiency, and ease of use. However, challenges such as the need for specialized knowledge, platform dependence, and difficulty in scalability in building functional workflows persist for cloud-native application developers. To overcome these challenges and mitigate the burden of developing FaaS-based applications, in this paper, we propose a mechanism called Action Engine, that makes use of tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) at its kernel to interpret human language queries and automates FaaS workflow generation, thereby, reducing the need for specialized expertise and manual design. Action Engine includes modules to identify relevant functions from the FaaS repository and seamlessly manage the data dependency between them, ensuring the developer's query is processed and resolved. Beyond that, Action Engine can execute the generated workflow by injecting the user-provided arguments. On another front, this work addresses a gap in tool-augmented LLM research via adopting an Automatic FaaS Workflow Generation perspective to systematically evaluate methodologies across four fundamental sub-processes. Through benchmarking various parameters, this research provides critical insights into streamlining workflow automation for real-world applications, specifically in the FaaS continuum. Our evaluations demonstrate that the Action Engine achieves comparable performance to the few-shot learning approach while maintaining platform- and language-agnosticism, thereby, mitigating provider-specific dependencies in workflow generation. We notice that Action Engine can unlock FaaS workflow generation for non-cloud-savvy developers and expedite the development cycles of cloud-native applications.