Patent attributes
Systems and methods are described controlling ingestion of data items within a data stream by executions of a serverless function on a serverless compute system. A poller device can act as an intermediary between the data stream and the serverless function, iteratively retrieving data items from the data stream and passing them in invocations of the serverless function. To allow for fine-grained control of ingestion without requiring implementation of complex logic at the poller device, the poller device can enable the serverless function to pass instructions controlling subsequent operation of the poller device. Each execution of the serverless function may determine whether subsequent operation of the poller device should be altered, and if so, instruct the poller device accordingly. The poller device can then modify its operation pursuant to the instructions, enabling highly granular control of streaming data ingestion without inhibiting existing benefits of serverless computing.