Towards Osmotic Computing: Analyzing Overlay Network Solutions to Optimize the Deployment of Container-Based Microservices in Fog, Edge and IoT Environments

In recent years, the rapid growth of new Cloud technologies acted as an enabling factor for the adoption of microservices based architecture that leverages container virtualization in order to build modular and robust systems. As the number of containers running on hosts increases, it becomes essential to have tools to manage them in a simple, straightforward manner and with a high level of abstraction. Osmotic Computing is an emerging research field that studies the migration, deployment and optimization of microservices from the Cloud to Fog, Edge, and Internet of Things (IoT) environments. However, in order to achieve Osmotic Computing environments, connectivity issues have to be addressed. This paper investigates these connectivity issues leveraging different network overlays. In particular, we analyze the performance of four network overlays that are OVN, Calico, Weave, and Flannel. Our results give a concrete overview in terms of overhead and performances for each proposed overlay solution, helping us to understand which the best overlay solution is. Specifically, we deployed CoAP and FTP microservices which helped us to carry out these benchmarks and collect the results in terms of transfer times.