Adaptive Management of Volatile Edge Systems at Runtime With Satisfiability

Abstract

Edge computing offers the possibility of deploying applications at the edge of the network. To take advantage of available devices’ distributed resources, applications often are structured as microservices, often having stringent requirements of low latency and high availability. However, a decentralized edge system that the application may be intended for is characterized by high volatility, due to devices making up the system being unreliable or leaving the network unexpectedly. This makes application deployment and assurance that it will continue to operate under volatility challenging. We propose an adaptive framework capable of deploying and efficiently maintaining a microservice-based application at runtime, by tackling two intertwined problems: (i) finding a microservice placement across device hosts and (ii) deriving invocation paths that serve it. Our objective is to maintain correct functionality by satisfying given requirements in terms of end-to-end latency and availability, in a volatile edge environment. We evaluate our solution quantitatively by considering performance and failure recovery.