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Edge computing applications use the computational, sensor, and networking resources of nearby mobile and stationary computing devices. Because dissimilar devices can provide these resources, one cannot predict which exact combinations of resources will be available at runtime. The resulting variability hinders the development of edge computing applications. To address this problem, we present a new programming model that employs a domain-specific language (DSL), through which the developer declaratively specifies a collection of microservices and how they invoke each other. Given a concise declarative service suite specification, the DSL compiler automatically generates an execution plan, carried out by our distributed runtime. The resulting programming model is both reliable and efficient. The reliability is achieved by enabling the developer to provide equivalent microservices as switch-over recovery strategies. The efficiency is achieved by the DSL compiler orchestrating the speculatively parallel execution of certain equivalent microservices. Our evaluation demonstrates the reliability, efficiency, and expressiveness of the programming model, which can help developers who need to cope with variable resources at the edge.
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Equivalence-Enhanced Microservice Workflow Orchestration to Efficiently Increase Reliability
The applicability of the microservice architecture has extended beyond traditional web services, making steady inroads into the domains of IoT and edge computing. Due to dissimilar contexts in different execution environments and inherent mobility, edge and IoT applications suffer from low execution reliability. Replication, traditionally used to increase service reliability and scalability, is inapplicable in these resourcescarce environments. Alternately, programmers can orchestrate the parallel or sequential execution of equivalent microservices— microservices that provide the same functionality by different means. Unfortunately, the resulting orchestrations rely on parallelization, synchronization, and failure handing, all tedious and error-prone to implement. Although automated orchestration shifts the burden of generating workflows from the programmer to the compiler, existing programming models lack both syntactic and semantic support for equivalence. In this paper, we enhance compiler-generated execution orchestration with equivalence to efficiently increase reliability. We introduce a dataflow-based domain-specific language, whose dataflow specifications include the implicit declarations of equivalent microservices and their execution patterns. To automatically generate reliable workflows and execute them efficiently, we introduce new equivalence workflow constructs. Our evaluation results indicate that our solution can effectively and efficiently increase the reliability of microservice-based applications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717065
- PAR ID:
- 10154788
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 426 to 433
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICWS.2019.00076
