A Performance Exploration of Architectural Options for a Middleware for Decentralised Lightweight Edge Cloud Architectures
David von Leon, Lorenzo Miori, Julian Sanin, Nabil El Ioini, Sven Helmer, Claus Pahl · 2018
The integration of Cloud and IoT (Internet-of-Things) resulting in so-called edge clouds has started. This requires the combination of data centre management technologies with much more constrained devices. Lightweight virtualisation solutions such as containerisation can be used to distribute, deploy and manage edge cloud applications on clusters. Leightweightness also applies to the devices, where we focus here on small-board devices such as Raspberry Pis in our concrete case. These small-board devices are particularly useful in situations where a mix of robustness due to environmental conditions and low costs is required. We discuss different architectural solutions for the distribution of computation to edge cloud devices based on containers and other management approaches and evaluate these in terms of cost, power consumption and performance.