Fluence Lambda

Fluence Lambda is a decentralized serverless solution deeply rooted in the decentralized physical infrastructure (DePin) paradigm. Even more than most serverless solutions, Fluence Lambda lets you do more with less code and without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Unlike centralized cloud providers, Fluence Lambda lets you select capacity providers, i.e., data centers, a la carte from a marketplace allowing you to customize the serverless infrastructure exactly to your applications' performance, SLA and budget needs. By virtue of its DePin roots, Fluence Lambda scales at speed at exceptionally low cost without foregoing performance and service level. Moreover, Fluence Lambda is supported with a proof system concerning Lambda execution, i.e., Proof of Execution (PoE), and correctness of execution, i.e., Proof of Processing (PoP), that revolutionizes a broad range of audits and, of course, billing.

In A Nutshell

To make Fluence Lambda work for you, you essentially need to complete three distinct steps:

• Code and compile your business logic to Wasm
• Create and execute your deployment plan
• Create and manage your payments and billing

Fluence Lambda is available as a Wasm runtime called Marine, with more runtimes already under development, providing performant, available and portable functions across arbitrary capacity providers participating in the Fluence marketplace. Moreover, Fluence tooling includes Aqua, a distributed workflow engine akin to AWS Step Functions, for example, that allows you to choreograph and compose your distributed Lambdas into applications and even protocols.

Once you have coded your business logic in Rust and compiled it to the wasm-wasi compile target, you are ready to create your deployment plan. A deployment plan simply specifies how many instances of your Lambdas you want deployed, for how long, to what kind of (CPU and RAM)resources, in what locales, etc. You also specify your willingness to pay for those resources and are asked to escrow the total amount for your deployment.

Upon completion, you submit your deployment plan to the Fluence marketplace where the given deployment attributes are matched with capacity provider, i.e., data centers, attributes. Depending on the matching success, your Lambdas are deployed to the chosen providers or you are asked to refine your deployment plan. See Figure 1 for a stylized workflow.

Figure 1: Stylized Fluence Lambda Development And Deployment Flow

mermaid

    stateDiagram

    Developer --> Code: Business logic in Rust
    Code --> Lambda: Compile to wasm-wasi
    Developer --> PaymentGateway: Buy compute credits
    Developer --> DeploymentPlan: Specify runtime requirements and spot prices
    PaymentGateway --> DeploymentPlan: Escrow deployment payment 
    DeploymentPlan --> MarketMatcher: Send to match with capacity provider
    CapacityProviders --> MarketMatcher: Send to match with developer deployment plan
    MarketMatcher --> CapacityProvider_1: matched providers
    MarketMatcher --> CapacityProvider_2: matched providers
    MarketMatcher --> CapacityProvider_k: matched providers
    Lambda --> CapacityProvider_1: host and execute Lambda
    Lambda --> CapacityProvider_2: host and execute Lambda
    Lambda --> CapacityProvider_k: host and execute Lambda

    stateDiagram

    Developer --> Code: Business logic in Rust
    Code --> Lambda: Compile to wasm-wasi
    Developer --> PaymentGateway: Buy compute credits
    Developer --> DeploymentPlan: Specify runtime requirements and spot prices
    PaymentGateway --> DeploymentPlan: Escrow deployment payment 
    DeploymentPlan --> MarketMatcher: Send to match with capacity provider
    CapacityProviders --> MarketMatcher: Send to match with developer deployment plan
    MarketMatcher --> CapacityProvider_1: matched providers
    MarketMatcher --> CapacityProvider_2: matched providers
    MarketMatcher --> CapacityProvider_k: matched providers
    Lambda --> CapacityProvider_1: host and execute Lambda
    Lambda --> CapacityProvider_2: host and execute Lambda
    Lambda --> CapacityProvider_k: host and execute Lambda

Prior to being able to execute your deployment plan, you are required to acquire to purchase <compute tokens, USDC tokens> from one of the (Fiat) gateway providers. <Compute, USDC> tokens are escrowed according to each deployment plan and used to periodically compensate capacity providers for executing your Lambdas commensurate with the execution loads, i.e., CPU and memory model, length of execution, data payload, etc.

info

For the purpose of launching the Fluence Lambda public compute network, billing follows an epoch rather than execution-based model also known as a subscription model. That is, you are billed for having a provider host your Lambdas for some period of time regardless of execution instances or loads. This is a temporary constraint. For more info, see ???.

An integral part of the Fluence Lambda developer experience is the Fluence CLI, which supports all development and deployment aspects of a Fluence Lambda application.

Comparative Positioning

From a capabilities and development perspective, Fluence Lambda is very similar to other serverless solutions such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. Unlike these centralized serverless cloud providers, Fluence Lambda leverages the power and portability of Wasm to provide a high-performance compute runtime hosted and executed across a customizable, high-availability capacity mesh, thereby eliminating single points of failure, access controls, high exit barriers and excessive rent seeking. See Table 1.

Table 1: High Level Serverless Provider Comparison

	Fluence Lambda	AWS Lambda	Azure Functions	Google Cloud Functions
Runtime	Wasm more coming	Multiple	Multiple	Multiple
Languages	Rust more coming	Multiple	Multiple	Multiple
Workflow Engine	Aqua	Step Functions	Durable Functions	Cloud Functions Workflow
Endpoint Access	P2P or HTTP Gateway	HTTP	HTTP	HTTP
Capacity (Data Center)	Transparent & Selectable	Blackbox	Blackbox	Blackbox
Security Network
Security Serverless
CLI	Fluence CLI	AWS CLI	Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell	gcloud CLI

Unlike centralized cloud providers, the Fluence protocol enables an open, permisisonless peer-to-peer network that facilitates crowd sourcing of data center capacity. Make no mistake, the Fluence network is backed by a large number of Tier 4 data centers offering the best CPUs and RAM configurations at extremely competitive prices compared centralized cloud providers. The Fluence marketplace, backed by an innovative blockchain solution, allows you to create deployment contracts according to a variety of attributes necessary for you to build your Flunece Lambdas' performance, availability and security suitable for your budget in an entirely transparent manner. A blockchain-based algorithm is employed to match capacity provides against developers requirements.

While developers can ignore the intricacies of the peer-to-peer network, including network security solutions such as DDOS and other attack prevention or mitigation schemes, a salient difference between Fluence Lambda and other serverless solutions is that Fluence Lambda does not natively support HTTP request and response calls. However, this an easily surmountable challenge and Fluence already provides an out-of-the box solution to manage HTTP requests from your Fluence Lambdas.

Use Cases

By virtue of its on-demand, easy-to-scale and pay-per-execution model, serverless compute is inherently suitable to enable event-driven architectures and systems. Some of the use cases Fluence Lambda enables are summarized in Table 2.

Table 2: Sample Use Cases For Fluence Lambda

Type	Applications
Data Processing	Data preparation and processing
Process Control	Task scheduling
Messaging	Send notifications
APIs	Mobile and web apps
Serverless Workflows	Choreograph and compose Lambdas

In summary, Fluence Lambda supports the full breadth of event- and trigger-based solutions serverless developers like yourself are accustomed to.