Serverless computing allows developers to create workflows for complex
tasks through the composition of serverless functions. Current
serverless workflow engines rely on master-side patterns which hinder
the interaction between serverless functions, causing performance
issues. In this paper, a decentralized worker-side pattern is proposed
that provides enhanced performance by allowing each workflow function to
schedule itself from the current node to the next without having to
interact with the master controller. It treats the serverless workflow
as a whole unit and uses a locality strategy to optimize performance. A
new high-performance workflow engine called BriskChain has been
implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.
Experiments on a real-world application show that BriskChain is able to
achieve 2.5 times better performance than a state-of-the-art serverless
workflow engine.