Thinking out of replication for geo-distributing applications: the sharding case

To promote the adoption of the edge paradigm, our community needs innovative approaches for geo-distributing cloud applications across multiple locations without modifying existing business logic. While recent efforts propose using external services to orchestrate REST operations and achieve geo-distribution, relying solely on resource sharing and replication has limitations in finely distributing manipulated resources. This paper introduces a novel collaboration method that extends resources across multiple instances, going beyond simple replication. Our approach employs a shard-like strategy, enabling the creation of a distributed resource with a unified state view while mitigating a synchronization overhead. The effectiveness of our mechanism is demonstrated through a proof-of-concept implemented on top of the Kubernetes ecosystem.