A demo of application lifecycle management for IoT collaborative neighborhood in the Fog: Practical experiments and lessons learned around docker

Regarding latency, privacy, resiliency and network scarcity management, only distributed approaches such as proposed by Fog Computing architecture can efficiently address the fantastic growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT applications could be deployed and run hierarchically at different levels in an infrastructure ranging from centralized datacenters to the connected things themselves. Consequently, software entities composing IoT applications could be executed in many different configurations. The heterogeneity of the equipment and devices of the target infrastructure opens opportunities in the placement of the software entities, taking into account their requirements in terms of hardware, cyber-physical interactions and software dependencies. Once the most appropriate place has been found, software entities have to be deployed and run. Container-based virtualization has been considered to overpass the complexity of packaging, deploying and running software entities in a heterogeneous distributed infrastructure at the vicinity of the connected devices. This paper reports a practical experiment presented as a live demo that showcases a “Smart Bell in a Collaborative Neighborhood” IoT application in the Fog. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) has been put in place based on Docker technologies to deploy and run micro-services in the context of Smart Homes operated by Orange.