Reducio: Optimized Confidential Serverless Cloud Deployments for Enterprise Customers
2026-08-31 • Cryptography and Security
Cryptography and Security
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied serverless platforms that use Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) to keep data private while running functions quickly. They found that current designs need big changes to infrastructure and a lot of memory. To fix this, the authors created Reducio, a new platform that works without changing the infrastructure and uses much less memory. Reducio uses a special way to isolate functions inside CVMs and a smart caching method to save memory. Their tests show Reducio can lower both the infrastructure needs and memory use for running serverless functions.
Serverless ComputingConfidential Virtual Machines (CVMs)Function IsolationKernel DeprivilegingCaching AlgorithmsPlatform MemoryInfrastructure ChangesFunction Cache
Authors
Vikram Ramaswamy, Chuqi Zhang, Adil Ahmad
Abstract
Serverless platforms based on Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) have been recently proposed to address the privacy problems with serverless functions, while achieving low latency. Unfortunately, our study indicates that to achieve these properties, existing proposals impose non-trivial requirements in terms of infrastructure changes and platform memory. Reducio is an alternate serverless platform design that does not require infrastructure changes and significantly reduces platform memory requirements. The platform is designed using two key components: (1) a function isolation framework inside a CVM based on kernel deprivileging features that minimize infrastructure requirements, and (2) a layer-wise caching methodology and algorithm that effectively uses a small in-memory function cache. Our evaluation indicates that Reducio can significantly reduce both platform requirements for deployment and function memory consumption.