EMsaaS: A Decentralized Marketplace for Microservices on Edge

This work proposes a marketplace model, EMsaaS , for sharing microservices on the IoT network on edge. Containerized microservices are well-suited for real-time IoT applications on edge because of their lightweight nature, independent lifecycle, and scalability. However, deploying microservices on demand is often failure-prone because of edge bandwidth limitations and resource constraints. Additionally, centralized image registries hosting containerized application images are often far away from the edge site and incur latency for the download of the images. They are also prone to a single point of failure. This work proposes a decentralized mechanism for sharing microservices in the edge network using a peer-to-peer approach. We introduce a component Edge Microservice Tracker and deploy it on the participating edge nodes. This component communicates with the other peer nodes and discovers microservices in the network. When requested, it fetches the requested microservice from the host node and deploys the same on the requesting edge node. We implement the proposed system in an IoT network of edge devices and evaluate the model using several parameters such as the deployment time, CPU and memory consumption, internet upload/download rate, and metadata synchronization time for sharing microservices on the edge. We observe that the system performs better than the cloud or centralized registry based approach with respect to the microservice deployment time with almost a 30% reduction in the deployment time even without any bandwidth limit for internet download from the edge node. It further surpasses the cloud registry-based microservice deployment procedure, with edge nodes having bandwidth limits. Moreover, EMsaaS proposes the concept of microservice sharing in an edge network, which enhances collaboration between edge service providers and fosters faster innovations.