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Open-Source Serverless for Edge Computing: A Tutorial

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Serverless Computing: Principles and Paradigms

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies ((LNDECT,volume 162))

Abstract

Serverless computing is a recent deployment model for cloud, edge and fog computing platforms, which ultimate goal is to provide cost reduction and scalability enhancement with no additional deployment overhead. The main implementation of this model is Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS): Developers deploy modular functions, which are typically event-driven, on the platform without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. Moreover, using the so called warm start mode, the FaaS containers hosting the application are kept up and running after initialization, granting the user the impression of high availability. Conversely, in a cold start mode scenario, those containers are deleted when no application requests are received within a certain time window, to save resources. This focus on resources efficiency and flexibility could make the serverless approach significantly convenient for edge computing based applications, in which the hosting nodes consist of devices and machines with limited resources, geographically distributed in proximity to the users. In this paper, we explore the available solutions to deploy a serverless application in an edge computing scenario, with a focus on open-source tools and IoT data.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A Pod is a single running entity containing one or more containers.

  2. 2.

    https://www.iguazio.com/.

  3. 3.

    Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language with memory safety, garbage collection and structural typing features.

  4. 4.

    Available only in OpenFaaS PRO.

  5. 5.

    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openfaas/faas/master/api-docs/swagger.yml.

  6. 6.

    Kubernetes Secrets can be passwords, tokens or keys. Secrets are stored in the API server’s underlying data store (etcd).

  7. 7.

    Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language designed for performance and security, especially safe concurrency. Syntactically similar to C++, it can also guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker to validate references.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/openfaas/connector-sdk.

  9. 9.

    https://istio.io/.

  10. 10.

    https://opennetworking.org/onos/.

  11. 11.

    https://www.opendaylight.org/.

  12. 12.

    https://openvpn.net/.

  13. 13.

    https://www.openvswitch.org/.

  14. 14.

    https://istio.io/.

  15. 15.

    https://www.consul.io/.

  16. 16.

    https://oneedge.io/.

  17. 17.

    https://github.com/OpenIotOrg/openiot.

  18. 18.

    https://openwrt.org/.

  19. 19.

    https://www.ipfire.org/.

  20. 20.

    https://prometheus.io/.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by the EU project 5G-CARMEN under grant agreement No. 825012. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the project. The Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. Section 6 was also supported by the Vlaio TETRA OpenCloudEdge project, project number HBC.2019.2017.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, via G.Duranti 93, 06125, Perugia, Italy

    Priscilla Benedetti, Mauro Femminella & Gianluca Reali

  2. Department of Electronics and Informatics (ETRO), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Priscilla Benedetti & Kris Steenhaut

  3. Department of Engineering Technology (INDI), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Luca Gattobigio & An Braeken

  4. Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT), 43124, Parma, Italy

    Mauro Femminella & Gianluca Reali

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  1. Priscilla Benedetti
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  2. Luca Gattobigio
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  4. Mauro Femminella
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  6. An Braeken
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Correspondence to Priscilla Benedetti .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India

    Rajalakshmi Krishnamurthi

  2. School of Computer Science, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India

    Adarsh Kumar

  3. School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Sukhpal Singh Gill

  4. School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Rajkumar Buyya

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Benedetti, P., Gattobigio, L., Steenhaut, K., Femminella, M., Reali, G., Braeken, A. (2023). Open-Source Serverless for Edge Computing: A Tutorial. In: Krishnamurthi, R., Kumar, A., Gill, S.S., Buyya, R. (eds) Serverless Computing: Principles and Paradigms. Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol 162. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26633-1_5

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