Article accepted to HotEdge 2018 -
Edge Computing Resource Management System: a Critical Building Block!
Ronan-Alexandre Cherrueau, Adrien Lebre, Dimitri Pertin, Fetahi Wuhib and João Monteiro Soares
Most current infrastructures for cloud computing leverage static and greedy policies for the placement of virtual machines. Such policies impede the optimal allocation of resources from the infrastructure provider viewpoint. Over the last decade, more dynamic and often more efficient policies based, e.g., on consolidation and load balancing techniques, have been developed. Due to the underlying complexity of cloud infrastructures, these policies are evaluated either using limited scale testbeds/in-vivo experiments or ad-hoc simulators. These validation methodologies are unsatisfactory for two important reasons: they (i) do not model precisely enough real production platforms (size, workload variations, failure, etc.) and (ii) do not enable the fair comparison of different approaches. More generally, new placement algorithms are thus continuously being proposed without actually identifying their benefits with respect to the state of the art.
While it is clear that edge infrastructures are required for emerging use-cases related to IoT, VR or NFV, there is currently no resource management system able to deliver all the features that make the success of cloud computing for the edge (e.g., an OpenStack for the edge). Since building a system from scratch is impractical, this paper provides reflections regarding how existing solutions can be leveraged. To that end, we provide a list of the fea- tures required to administrate and use edge computing re- sources, and investigate how existing IaaS managers (i.e., OpenStack) satisfy these requirements. Finally, we iden- tify from this study two approaches to design an edge infrastructure manager that fulfills our requirements, and discuss their pros and cons. This paper aims at initiating the discussion in our community.
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