Investigating Edge vs. Cloud Computing Trade-offs for Stream Processing

The recent spectacular rise of the Internet of Things and the associated augmentation of the data deluge motivated the emergence of Edge computing as a means to distribute processing from centralized Clouds towards decentralized processing units close to the data sources. This led to new challenges in ways to distribute processing across Cloud-based, Edge-based or hybrid Cloud/Edge-based infrastructures. In particular, a major question is: how much can one improve (or degrade) the performance of an application by performing computation closer to the data sources rather than in the Cloud? This paper proposes a methodology to understand such performance trade-offs and illustrates it through experimental evaluation with two real-life stream processing use-cases executed on fully-Cloud and hybrid Cloud-Edge testbeds using state-of-the-art processing engines for each environment. We derive a set of take-aways for the community, highlighting the limitations of each environment, the scenarios that could benefit from hybrid Edge-Cloud deployments, what relevant parameters impact performance and how.