Definitions

The description of the Oyster serverless protocol in the following sub-sections makes recurring references to certain actors, modules and variables. Such commonly used terms have been described below for easy reference.

• Users: Users of the protocol who want to execute compute in a serverless fashion, accessible through a HTTP interface
• Protocol chain: A singular common chain which runs the core of the protocol
• Protocol contract: Contract that manages user deposits and billing
• Gateways: Nodes running inside an enclave that are responsible for proxying and load balancing requests and responses between the users and the executors
• Executors: Nodes that listen to requests from gateways, perform the computation and send back responses
• GlobalMaxTimeout: Protocol parameter that limits the maximum duration a request can take in order to ensure gateways and executors can be drained and gracefully stopped in a bounded amount of time