# Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Serverless Data Science -- Are We There Yet? A Case Study of Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02958/) (2021)
- [textscPerseus: Tracing the Masterminds Behind Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Schemes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01686/) (2025)
- [Keep Your Friends Close: Leveraging Affinity Groups to Accelerate AI Inference Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11488/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms and "serverless" cloud computing are becoming increasingly popular. Current FaaS offerings are targeted at stateless functions that do minimal I/O and communication. We argue that the benefits of serverless computing can be extended to a broader range of applications and algorithms. We present the design and implementation of Cloudburst, a stateful FaaS platform that provides familiar Python programming with low-latency mutable state and communication, while maintaining the autoscaling benefits of serverless computing. Cloudburst accomplishes this by leveraging Anna, an autoscaling key-value store, for state sharing and overlay routing combined with mutable caches co-located with function executors for data locality. Performant cache consistency emerges as a key challenge in this architecture. To this end, Cloudburst provides a combination of lattice-encapsulated state and new definitions and protocols for distributed session consistency. Empirical results on benchmarks and diverse applications show that Cloudburst makes stateful functions practical, reducing the state-management overheads of current FaaS platforms by orders of magnitude while also improving the state of the art in serverless consistency.