[freyir]

> It does not seem impossible to imagine a function that spawns code close to data

The authors discuss this:

To achieve good performance, the infrastructure should be able and willing to physically colocate certain code and data. This is often best achieved by shipping code to data, rather than the current FaaS approach of pulling data to code. At the same time, elasticity requires that code and data be logically separated, to allow infrastructure to adapt placement: sometimes data needs to be replicated or repartitioned to match code needs. In essence, this is the traditional challenge of data independence, but at extreme and varying scale, with multi-tenanted usage and fine-grained adaptivity in time.

Not impossible to imagine, but the challenges are non-trivial.