Flagship: Reimagining Stateful Serverless Architectures at the Edge : An edge-first stateful serverless feature flag service

Sammanfattning

Feature flag systems enable dynamic control of application features without code redeployment, playing a crucial role in modern software development. While edge computing and serverless architectures offer promising solutions for low-latency applications, integrating stateful services into these environ- ments presents significant challenges. This research investigates how stateful services in commercial edge computing platforms influence the feasibility and performance of stateful serverless applications, through the implementation and evaluation of a feature flag management system. We developed FlagShip, an edge-based feature flag management system utilizing stateful serverless functions and storage services from a commercial edge platform provider. Through extensive evaluation, we compared FlagShip’s performance against traditional cloud-hosted feature flag services, analyzing metrics such as client-side and server-side latency across different deployment configurations. Our results demonstrate that FlagShip achieved up to 70% reduction in client-side latency and 93% decrease in server-side latency compared to baseline implementations. Notably, a cached cloud-hosted variant outperformed all implementations, including edge deployments, challenging conventional assumptions about edge computing’s performance advantages. These findings provide valuable insights into the practical implications of building stateful edge applications, highlighting the critical role of storage and caching solutions that operate within the same runtime environment.