Cloudless Computing - A Vision to Become Reality

Today's data centers heavily profit from virtualization technologies that reduce both CapEx and OpEx and allow them to deliver applications in a microservice fashion. Therefore, the underlying network layer is delivered in a flexible and agile way by Software Defined Networks (SDNs), which enable centralized management being directly programmable. Additionally, integrating Network Function Virtualization (NFV) lets the cloud provider perform intelligent network and microservice management. Besides, with the rapid increase of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its billion devices, a rethinking of microservice placement and chaining in the cloud-to-fog-continuum is needed to reduce the burden of unnecessary data traffic in the core network. For this reason, lighter virtualization approaches need to be evaluated and applications scaled to the requirements of energy-efficient devices. In our paper, we investigate the delivery of networked applications with small-sized containers, which especially support Single Board Computers (SBCs). The presented results and our prototype are a first step towards cloudless computing.