Maintenance Operations on Cloud, Edge, and IoT Environments: Taxonomy, Survey, and Research Challenges

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) introduced new classes of applications whose latency and bandwidth requirements could not be satisfied by the traditional Cloud Computing model. Consequently, the Internet Technology community promoted the cooperation of two paradigms, Cloud Computing and Edge Computing, combining large-scale computing power and real-time processing capabilities. A significant management challenge in such complex infrastructure concerns the development of efficient maintenance strategies to preserve the environment’s performance and security. While the abundant resources from the academic literature could support the design of novel maintenance solutions, extracting actionable insights from the existing approaches is challenging, given the massive number of published papers. Furthermore, existing review papers, which could help summarize the state-of-the-art, scope their investigations to the maintenance of certain components in particular scenarios. This work fills this gap with a broader literature analysis that covers maintenance strategies targeting physical and logical components in cloud, edge, and IoT environments. First, we introduce a taxonomy that organizes existing solutions according to several characteristics. Then, we review the literature following the taxonomy structure to facilitate the understanding of the research landscape and the comparison between existing works. Finally, we shed light on open challenges that represent promising research directions.