Cheops, a Service to Blow Away Cloud Applications to the Edge

Abstract

One question to answer the shift from the Cloud to the Edge computing paradigm is: how distributed applications developed for Cloud platforms can benefit from the opportunities of the Edge while dealing with inherent constraints of wide-area network links? Our solution to this question is to give the illusion of "single service images" spreading over the Edge infrastructure. Thanks to the modularity of micro-service based applications, one can deploy multiple instances of the same service (one per edge site) and deliver collaborations between them according to each request. This non-invasive approach is made possible by (i) a DSL that extends the application API and allows DevOps to program where/how the execution of each request should be executed, (ii) and its runtime, Cheops, a service that interprets and orchestrates each request in order to satisfy the geo-distribution parameters, allowing collaborations in a transparent manner for the underlying application. We demonstrate the relevance of our proposal by illustrating how Cheops can successfully geodistribute the Kubernetes vanilla code.