Autonomic Data Placement Strategies for Update-intensiveWeb applications

Edge computing infrastructures have become the leading platform for hosting Web applications. One of the key challenges in these infrastructures is the replication of application data. In our earlier research, we presented GlobeDB, a middleware for edge computing infrastructures that performs autonomic replication of application data. In this paper, we study the problem of data unit placement for update-intensive Web applications in the context of GlobeDB. Our hypothesis is that there exists a continuous spectrum of placement choices between complete partitioning of sets of data units across edge servers and full replication of data units to all servers. We propose and evaluate different families of heuristics for this problem of replica placement. As we show in our experiments, a heuristic that takes into account both the individual characteristics of data units and the overall system load performs best