The paper "Histrio: a Serverless Actor System", authored by Luca De Martini, Giorgio Natale Buttiglieri, and Alessandro Margara from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering – Politecnico di Milano, has won the Best Paper Award at the ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS), held in Gothenburg, Sweden, from June 10 to 13, 2025.

The paper explores the growing use of the serverless model for cloud applications—an approach that allows developers to handle large numbers of users and data without having to worry about technical infrastructure, such as servers or resource allocation. However, this model also requires a new way of writing software, which can make development more complex.

In the serverless model known as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), programs are split into small, independent functions that do not retain information between executions. This forces developers to manually handle complex tasks such as data storage, managing multiple operations at once, and keeping information consistent—taking time and focus away from building core features.

The paper presents Histrio, a new system designed to make it easier to create serverless applications that can “remember” data between executions. Inspired by the actor model, Histrio automatically manages memory, databases, and simultaneous operations, while also optimizing how data is stored. The system ensures that each operation is executed exactly once and correctly, providing reliable results.

Compared to traditional approaches, Histrio simplifies developers’ work by reducing the amount of code they need to write, while offering tools to help balance performance and cost.