Elastic Services for Edge Computing

Edge computing enables new, low-latency services close to data producers
and consumers. However, edge service management is challenged by high
hardware heterogeneity and missing elasticity capabilities. To address
these challenges, this paper introduces the concept of elastic services.
Elastic services are situation aware and can adapt themselves to the
current execution environment dynamically to adhere to their Service Level
Objectives (SLOs). This adaptation is achieved through Diversifiable
Programming (DivProg), a new programming model which uses function
annotations as interface between the service logic, its SLOs, and the
execution framework. DivProg enables developers to characterize their
services in a way that allows a third-party execution framework to run them
with the flow and the parametrization that conforms to changing SLOs. We
develop a prototype and perform an experimental evaluation which shows
that elastic services can seamlessly adapt to heterogeneous platforms
and scale with a wide range of input sizes, while adhering to their SLOs
with little programming effort.