Revising OpenStack to Operate Fog/Edge Computing Infrastructures

Abstract

Abstract-Academic and industry experts are now advocating for going from large-centralized Cloud Computing infrastructures to smaller ones massively distributed at the edge of the network. Among the obstacles to the adoption of this model is the development of a convenient and powerful IaaS system capable of managing a significant number of remote data-centers in a unified way.In this paper, we introduce the premises of such a system by revising the OpenStack software, a leading IaaS manager in the industry. The novelty of our solution is to operate such an Internet-scale IaaS platform in a fully decentralized manner, using P2P mechanisms to achieve high flexibility and avoid single points of failure. More precisely, we describe how we revised the OpenStack Nova service by leveraging a distributed key/value store instead of the centralized SQL backend. We present experiments that validate the correct behavior and gives performance trends of our prototype through an emulation of several data-centers using Grid'5000 testbed. In addition to paving the way to the first large-scale and Internet-wide IaaS manager, we expect this work will attract a community of specialists from both distributed system and network areas to address the Fog/Edge Computing challenges within the OpenStack ecosystem.

All one needs to know about fog computing and related edge computing paradigms: A complete survey

“…Their framework allows injected code at runtime through the cloud, which they define as "contextualization. " Similarly, the authors in [150] revise OpenStack Nova service for compatibility with fog/edge systems, by leveraging a distributed key/value store instead of the centralized SQL backend 13 .…”

fogØ5: Unifying the computing, networking and storage fabrics end-to-end

“…For instance, in [4] an OpenStack based infrastructure is proposed to serve as a fog layer for smart cities. In [8], the authors identify some of the limitations induced by OpenStack's centralized architecture and propose the use of a distributed key value store to eliminate the dependency on a centralized database. While these contributions are on the right track toward enabling fog computing, they are biased toward virtualizing the edge infrastructure as opposed to providing an end-to-end solution that can virtualize, manage and operate from the cloud to the thing while addressing the heterogeneity specific to fog computing.…”

Reconsidering the Relationship Between Cloud Computing and Cloud Manufacturing

“…However, research challenges also arise from the design of Fog and Edge infrastructures, particularly when dealing with massively geo-distributed control building blocks of IaaSes for very heterogeneous resources [3,8].…”