WebAssembly or Container? Joint Optimization of Microservice Consolidation and Deployment towards Cost Efficient Edge-End Consortium
Zhexiong Li, Deze Zeng, Ranzhao Chen · 2024
Edge-End Consortium, with the integration of edge computing servers and end devices like IoT devices, has emerged as a promising infrastructure for on-site computing power provision. But the high heterogeneity has raised unprecedented challenges in its resource management and task scheduling. Both WebAssembly and Container provide lightweight and portable way to consolidate and deploy microservices to combat the heterogeneity problem. However, the inherent advantages and disadvantages of WebAssembly and Container make it nontrivial to decide the microservice consolidation way and the deployment site, especially in the consideration of dependency between microservices. In this paper, we investigate the problem of mixed deployment of WebAssembly and Container based dependent microservices to strike a balance between communication and deployment cost toward high overall cost efficiency. We first cast this problem into a Quadratic Integer Programming (QIP) formulation and prove it as NP-hard. We then introduce a Randomized Rounding WebAssembly and Containerized Microservice Deployment (RR-WCMD) algorithm with polynomial computation complexity and guaranteed performance efficiency. Experiment results show that RR-WCMD can significantly lower the cost by an average of 34% in comparison with state-of-theart algorithms, thanks to the joint consideration of consolidation way and deployment site.