Towards Osmotic Computing: a Blue-Green Strategy for the Fast Re-Deployment of Microservices

The rapid development of Cloud, Edge, Fog Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has played a key role in the Industry 4.0 evolution. In this context, the Osmotic Computing paradigm, theorized in 2016 as integration between a centralized Cloud layer and Edge and/or IoT layers, has further emphasized the Industry 4.0 objectives including productivity and Quality of Services (QoS). This emerging paradigm proposes a new elastic management model of microservices, where deployment and migration strategies are strongly related to the underlaying infrastructure requirements (i.e., load balancing, reliability, availability, and so on) and applications (i.e., anomalies detection, awareness of the context, proximity, QoS, and so on). Specifically, knowing that an Osmotic application must have a failover behavior (highly horizontally/vertically scalable, 24 hours 24 available, fault-tolerant and secure), this paper highlights the Osmotic ecosystem platform focusing on the implementation of a blue-green mechanism for the fast re-deployment of microservices, exploiting emerging technologies, such as Docker, Kubernetes, Agento and MongoDB. Experiments shows the time required to arrange, deploy and destroy microservices.