Thinking out of replication for geo-distributing applications: the sharding case

Abstract

To promote the adoption of the edge paradigm, our community needs innovative approaches for geo-distributing cloud applications across multiple locations without modifying existing business logic. While recent efforts propose using external services to orchestrate REST operations and achieve geodistribution, relying solely on resource sharing and replication has limitations in finely distributing manipulated resources. This paper introduces a novel collaboration method that extends resources across multiple instances, going beyond simple replication. Our approach employs a shard-like strategy, enabling the creation of a distributed resource with a unified state view while mitigating a synchronization overhead. The effectiveness of our mechanism is demonstrated through a proof-of-concept implemented on top of the Kubernetes ecosystem.