Serverless Container Cluster Management for Lightweight Edge Clouds
Fabian Gand, Ilenia Fronza, Nabil El Ioini, Hamid R. Barzegar, Claus Pahl
Abstract
Clusters consisting of lightweight single-board devices are used in a variety of use cases: from microcon-trollers regulating the production process of an assembly line to roadside controllers monitoring and managing traffic. Often, data that is accumulated on the devices has to be sent to remote cloud data centers for processing. However, with hardware capabilities of controllers continuously increasing and the need for better performance and security through local processing, directly processing data on a remote cluster, known as Edge Computing, is a favourable solution. Recent trends such as microservices, containerization and server-less technology provide solutions for interconnecting the nodes and deploying software across the created cluster. This paper aims at proposing a serverless architecture for clustered container applications. The architecture relies on the MQTT protocol for communication, Prometheus for monitoring and Docker swarm in conjunction with openFaas for deploying services across a cluster. Using the proposed architecture as a foundation, a concrete traffic management application is implemented as a proof-of-concept. Results show that the proposed architecture meets performance requirements. However, the network setup as well as the network capabilities of the used devices were identified as potential bottlenecks.