Decentralized and Stateful Serverless Computing on the Internet Computer Blockchain
summary
The Internet Computer runs stateful canisters compiled to WebAssembly under a Wasmtime sandbox, with canisters allowed up to 64 GB memory and deployed across ~550 nodes in 18 countries. State is checkpointed every 500 rounds using heap-delta pages and on-demand page mapping; prefetching yields 1.25–3.5x speedups. Billing uses instruction-count billing (not wall clock). Production numbers show ~300,000 canisters holding ~3.5 TB state. Benchmarks: small CPU jobs beat top serverless, larger jobs run at ~50% performance; ~20% overhead is blockchain work and ~20% is the execution layer.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Internet Computer platform
- 0:24Decentralized computation vision
- 1:08Replicated state machines
- 2:12Canisters and WebAssembly
- 2:55Four system layers
- 3:58Update vs query messages
- 5:41Byzantine fault tolerance
- 6:05Statefulness and persistence
- 7:28Execution environment
- 9:57Page protection and single handler mechanism
- 11:20Memory optimizations
- 12:03Scheduling challenges
- 13:07Billing and fairness
- 14:11Instruction slicing
- 15:15Serverless computing
- 16:43Decentralization benefits
- 17:05Performance comparison
- 18:26Memory overhead
- 19:29Adoption metrics
- 20:10Conclusion
- 20:32Q&A
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