Elastic Services for Edge Computing

Edge computing enables new, low-latency services close to data producers and consumers. However, edge service management is challenged by high hardware heterogeneity and missing elasticity capabilities. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the concept of elastic services. Elastic services are situation aware and can adapt themselves to the current execution environment dynamically to adhere to their Service Level Objectives (SLOs). This adaptation is achieved through Diversifiable Programming (DivProg), a new programming model which uses function annotations as interface between the service logic, its SLOs, and the execution framework. DivProg enables developers to characterize their services in a way that allows a third-party execution framework to run them with the flow and the parametrization that conforms to changing SLOs. We develop a prototype and perform an experimental evaluation which shows that elastic services can seamlessly adapt to heterogeneous platforms and scale with a wide range of input sizes, while adhering to their SLOs with little programming effort.