A Process Model for the Development of Microservice-based Applications in 5G Edge Computing

Edge Computing brings services much closer to the end users, which allows for better overall Quality of Service (QoS) and the possibility of implementing latency-critical applications (such as real-time alerting in the use case of Smart Cities). The amount of computing devices increases massively, but such a fine granularity of systems also comes with disadvantages. Edge devices are much more diverse and resource-constrained, if compared to traditional cloud resources. Thus, an Edge infrastructure requires particular care in development and monitoring. While standards and industrial practices exist for the development of Edge infrastructures, there is currently a lack of comprehensive contextual guidelines for developing software that should run on such infrastructures. We provide a process model that serves as a template for teams working on the development of Edge-native applications, and show a contextualized implementation that demonstrates how we adapted our design in an industrial setting.