Transactions and Serverless are Made for Each Other

Serverless cloud offerings are becoming increasingly popular for stateless applications because they simplify cloud deployment. This article argues that if serverless platforms could wrap functions in database transactions, they would also be a good fit for database-backed applications. There are two unique benefits of such a transactional serverless platform: time-travel debugging of past events and reliable program execution with "exactly-once" semantics. Serverless cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda and Azure Functions are increasingly popular for building production applications as varied as website front ends, machine-learning (ML) pipelines, and image-processing systems. These platforms radically simplify development by managing application deployment.