eCaaS: A Management Framework of Edge Container as a Service for Business Workload

Enterprises are containerizing their business applications and extending those applications from cloud to edge to achieve better flexibility, agility, and performance for their business workload. Unlike data centers, edge sites including infrastructure and orchestration systems are often heterogeneous and highly customized depending on the resource availability, business requirements of the use case, and technical requirements of the application. However, in many business use cases, the lack of IT professionals with proper domain expertise makes it very challenging to create, manage, and support heterogeneous containerized edge sites at a large scale.

In this work, we present the eCaaS framework that provides automated lifecycle management of containerized edge sites and applications. With eCaaS, users can create customized edge sites with only high-level business intents which are analyzed and translated to deployment templates with low-level specifications. The edge site deployment templates are then automatically executed to build, deploy, and configure the containerized edge sites and applications. To support more customization options in the future, eCaaS decouples user intents, deployment rules, and deployment specifications and formulates deployment template generation as an SMT problem to achieve better scalability and extensibility. For creating an edge site with five nodes, eCaaS takes less than one second to generate the deployment template and less than ten minutes to complete the entire deployment.