Toward Distributed Computing Environments with Serverless Solutions in Edge Systems

Computation offloading through stateless applications is gaining momentum thanks to the emergence of serverless frameworks with inherent scalability properties. However, adoption of a serverless framework in an edge computing system requires careful consideration to keep its advantages unscathed. In the cloud, micro-services are scaled automatically according to demands, but in edge computing this would incur a significantly higher cost than in a data center and cannot be as fluid. This is especially relevant in scenarios where edge nodes are spread across large areas and have relatively small computation capabilities. In this article we propose to overcome this issue by adapting the allocation of demands to the currently allocated micro-services at short timescales, with two alternative mechanisms designed for different target scenarios, both aimed at enabling distributed computing environments. The proposed solution can be integrated within the ETSI MEC standard, which specifies a reference architecture and open service interfaces. Our contribution is validated in a proof-of-concept scenario with a prototype implementation released as open source.