Microservices Scheduling Model Over Heterogeneous Cloud-Edge Environments As Support for IoT Applications

TLDR

The paper proposes a scheduling model for microservices over heterogeneous cloud‑edge environments to increase the utilization of non‑general‑purpose devices at reduced cost and illustrates its use in two real‑world scenarios. The model is defined by a mathematical formulation of an architecture with heterogeneous machines, and its feasibility is evaluated using an enhanced CloudSim framework that supports risk analysis and experimental simulation of the proposed scheduling. Experimental results show that simple scheduling algorithms can outperform more complex ones in common cloud‑edge situations when adopting a microservice‑oriented approach.

Abstract

Motivated by the high-interest in increasing the utilization of nongeneral purpose devices in reaching computational objectives with a reduced cost, we propose a new model for scheduling microservices over heterogeneous cloud-edge environments. Our model uses a particular mathematical formulation for describing an architecture that includes heterogeneous machines that can handle different microservices. Since any new model asks for an early risk-analysis of the solution, we improved the CloudSim simulation framework to be suitable for an experiment that includes that kind of systems. In this paper, we discuss two examples of real-life utilizations of our proposed scheduling architecture. For an objective appreciation of the first example, we also include some experimental results based on the developed simulation tool. As a result of our interpretation of the experimental results we find out that some very simple scheduling algorithms may outperform some others in given situations that are frequently present in cloud-edge environments when we are using a microservice-oriented approach.