VeriFogOps: Automated Deployment Tool Selection and CI/CD Pipeline Generation for Verifying Fog Systems at Deployment Time

Fog Computing consists in decentralizing the Cloud by geographically distributing computation, storage, network resources, and related services. Among other benefits, it allows reducing bandwidth usage, limiting latency, or minimizing data transfers. However, Fog systems engineering remains challenging and quite often error-prone. Following best practices in software engineering, verification tasks can be performed before such systems are concretely deployed. Works already exist on verifying non-functional properties of Fog systems at different previous steps of the life cycle. This paper goes one step further and presents the VeriFogOps approach. This approach allows to automatically select deployment tools, based on expressed Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, and then generate relevant CI/CD pipelines supporting the deployment of Fog systems. We implemented and validated our approach via two realistic use cases, considering different QoS solutions and deployment tools. This work, developed in direct collaboration with our industrial partner Smile, goes towards the direction of a more comprehensive support for the entire life cycle of Fog systems, from design to actual deployment and execution.