Revising OpenStack to Operate Fog/Edge Computing Infrastructures

Abstract

Academic and industry experts are now advocating for going from large-centralized Cloud Computing infrastructures to smaller ones massively distributed at the edge of the network. Among the obstacles to the adoption of this model is the development of a convenient and powerful IaaS system capable of managing a significant number of remote data-centers in a unified way. In this paper, we introduce the premises of such a system by revising the OpenStack software, a leading IaaS manager in the industry. The novelty of our solution is to operate such an Internet-scale IaaS platform in a fully decentralized manner, using P2P mechanisms to achieve high flexibility and avoid single points of failure. More precisely, we describe how we revised the OpenStack Nova service by leveraging a distributed key/value store instead of the centralized SQL backend. We present experiments that validate the correct behavior and gives performance trends of our prototype through an emulation of several data-centers using Grid'5000 testbed. In addition to paving the way to the first large-scale and Internet-wide IaaS manager, we expect this work will attract a community of specialists from both distributed system and network areas to address the Fog/Edge Computing challenges within the OpenStack ecosystem.