PlanetIgnite: A Self-Assembling, Lightweight, Infrastructure-as-a-Service Edge Cloud

PlanetIgnite is a general-purpose, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, self-assembling, lightweight edge cloud on virtualized infrastructure with support for single-pane-of-glass distributed application configuration and deployment. This is an entirely new concept. PlanetLab[32], GENI[7], [22], and SAVI[19] are general-purpose IaaS edge clouds, but require top-down installation and dedicated hardware resources at each site and do not offer single-pane-of-glass application deployment. Seattle[11] is a lightweight self-assembling edge cloud that offers single-pane-of-class configuration and control, but developers are restricted to using a subset of Python. PlanetIgnite is a Containers-as-a-Service Edge Cloud which offers Docker Containers to each PlanetIgnite user. A PlanetIgnite node is an off-the-shelf Ubuntu 14.04 Virtual machine with Docker installed, meaning it can be installed on any edge node where a VM with a routable v4 address is available. Adding a PlanetIgnite node to the infrastructure is simple: a site wishing to host a PlanetIgnite node simply downloads the image, on boot, the new PlanetIgnite node registers with the PlanetIgnite portal, which runs a series of acceptance tests. Once complete, the image is registered and the node is added to the set of PlanetIgnite sites.