Container Orchestration in Edge and Fog Computing Environments for Real-Time IoT Applications

This paper proposes an innovative machine learning algorithm for resource optimization in IoT fog network. The proposed model utilizes distributed semi-supervised learning with innovative ensemble learning for efficient resource optimization in the IoT fog network for improved availability and readiness. The proposed model shows a great potential for real-time IoT applications utilizing the efficient fog resource optimization. The proposed model is evaluated against other state-of the-art models using the benchmark data to demonstrate its readiness and usefulness in real-time mission critical IoT applications such as in unmanned vehicle control system. The proposed model shows an acceptable resource optimization performance with reasonable computational complexity which proves to be useful in real-time IoT applications.

Fog computing (also known as edge computing) is a decentralized computing architecture that seeks to minimize service latency and average response time in IoT applications by providing compute and network services physically close to end-users. Fog environment consists of a network of fog nodes and IoT applications are composed of containerized microservices communicating with each other. Due to limited resources of fog nodes, it is often not possible to deploy all the containers of an application on a single fog node. Therefore, communicating containers need to be distributed on multiple fog nodes. Distribution and management of containerized IoT applications is always a critical issue to the system performance in a fog environment. Kubernetes, an open-source system, has grown into a container orchestration standard by simplifying the deployment and management of containerized applications. Despite the progress made by the academia and industry with respect to container management and the wide-scale acceptance of Kubernetes in cloud environments, container management in fog environment is still in the early stage in terms of research and practical deployment. This article aims to fill this gap by analyzing the expediency of Kubernetes container orchestration tool in the fog computing model. The paper also highlights limitations with the current Kubernetes approach and provide ideas for further research to adapt to the needs of the fog environment. Lastly, we provide experiments that demonstrate the feasibility and industrial practicality of deploying and managing containerized IoT applications in the fog computing environment.

Internet of Things (IoT) is the developing technology that enables devices to communicate without human interaction. IoT utilizes cloud computing services to collect and process data for IoT devices and to manage the device remotely. Cloud computing is not efficient enough to handle the fast stream of data produced by the IoT, therefore scaling up IoT applications to meet demands of high peak becomes easier and highly automated in fog computing. Containers are mostly used as virtualization solutions for IoT in fog computing. It enables the execution of small microservices to large applications. However, the rise of many lightweight containers has resulted in new application architectures and fundamentally changing how applications are deployed and visualized. Due to this change, container orchestration tools were proposed. These tools allow users to coordinate and manage containers. However, container orchestration tools need to meet the requirements of IoT applications and constraints imposed on the nodes in fog. This paper presents a systematic literature review on the selection of orchestration tools for the efficient deployment of IoT applications in fog computing. Moreover, the performance of IoT applications must be considered by applying different metrics. This paper aims to propose potential research directions to address identified gaps in the selection of orchestration tools.

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology that is used not only by developers but also by end-users. It has vital importance in the Information Technology (IT) industries as its future would create a great transition from conventional IT services. These days, containerization in cloud computing has become an important research area. The selection of container orchestration tools is one of the difficult tasks for the organizations involved in the management of the vast number of containers. These tools have their strengths, weaknesses, and functionalities which need to be considered. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the container orchestration tools. This analysis would help the professionals to decide whether they need an orchestrator bound to a single technology or an orchestrator which provides the independent solution. In this paper, four popular orchestration tools viz., Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, and Redhat OpenShift are analyzed on various parameters viz., security, deployment, stability, scalability, cluster installation, and learning curve. We observed that Kubernetes has the best scheduling features whereas Docker Swarm is easy to use. We also found that Mesos has good scalability whereas OpenShift is a highly secure orchestration tool.

Compared to the traditional approach of using virtual machines as the basis for the development and deployment of applications running in Cloud-based infrastructures, container technology provides developers with a higher degree of portability and availability, allowing developers to build and deploy their applications in a much more efficient and flexible manner. A number of tools have been proposed to orchestrate complex applications comprising multiple containers requiring continuous monitoring and management actions to meet application-oriented and non-functional requirements. Different container orchestration tools provide different features that incur different overheads. As such, it is not always easy for developers to choose the orchestration tool that will best suit their needs. In this paper we compare the benefits and overheads incurred by the most popular open source container orchestration tools currently available, namely: Kubernetes and Docker in Swarm mode. We undertake a number of benchmarking exercises from well-known benchmarking tools to evaluate the performance overheads of container orchestration tools and identify their pros and cons more generally. The results show that the overall performance of Kubernetes is slightly worse than that of Docker in Swarm mode. However, Docker in Swarm mode is not as flexible or powerful as Kubernetes in more complex situations.

In the last few years, fog computing has been recognized as a promising approach to support modern IoT applications based on microservices. The main characteristic of this application involve the presence of geographically distributed sensors or mobile end users acting as sources of data. Relying on a cloud computing approach may not represent the most suitable solution in these scenario due to the non-negligible latency between data sources and distant cloud data centers, which may represent an issue in cases involving real-time and latency-sensitive IoT applications. Placing certain tasks, such as preprocessing or data aggregation, in a layer of fog nodes close to sensors or end users may help to decrease the response time of IoT applications as well as the traffic towards the cloud data centers. However, the fog scenario is characterized by a much more complex and heterogeneous infrastructure compared to a cloud data center, where the computing nodes and the inter-node connecting are more homogeneous. As a consequence, the the problem of efficiently placing microservices over distributed fog nodes requires novel and efficient solutions. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing and comparing different heuristics for placing the application microservices over the nodes of a fog infrastructure. We test the performance of the proposed heuristics and their ability to minimize application response times and satisfy the Service Level Agreement across a wide set of operating conditions in order to understand which approach is performs the best depending on the IoT application scenario.

Real-time IoT applications such as smart surveillance and autonomous monitoring require low-latency, high-reliability cloud communication. Standard cloud schedulers often fail to accommodate dynamic IoT workloads. This study proposes an AI-enhanced cloud scheduling algorithm that integrates reinforcement learning with predictive workload analytics to reduce latency and maintain service stability. The scheduler evaluates device mobility patterns, network congestion, message frequency and compute demand to assign tasks optimally across edge and cloud nodes. Experiments were performed using the EdgeCloudSim and iFogSim platforms, simulating smart transportation and industrial IoT scenarios. The model achieved a 35 percent decrease in end-to-end latency and a 22 percent increase in throughput when compared with round-robin and priority-based schedulers. Results indicate that integrating ML into scheduling algorithms significantly enhances the responsiveness of IoT-cloud ecosystems. The method is scalable to multi-region cloud clusters and suitable for production deployment. Future work will explore multi-agent scheduling strategies.

The last five years can safely be termed a Kubernetes Tsunami in the IT world. Kubernetes has been around since 2014, and it conquered not only the service catalogs of the major cloud providers but also most data centers around the world. Looking at the statistics reveals that if you want to run workloads in containers at scale, there is actually no other container orchestration tool around. In a report from Red Hat from 2021 asking organizations which container orchestration tool they use, you would still see mention of things like Mesosphere and Docker Swarm, but without a notable share and only with news coverage talking about “end-of-life.”

Modern developers typically run their workloads through cloud-native environments such as Docker and Kubernetes. Docker is a platform that runs and manages containers. With the birth of Docker, interest in containers and technology has grown. As one of the container orchestration tools that control and manage containers running on multiple hosts, Kubernetes has a very large share and is used by many cloud companies, making it the standard for practical container orchestration tools. Therefore, in this paper, by analyzing the Kubernetes event timeline, we present the future direction of Kubernetes and Docker, which are key tools in the cloud-native environment.

Containerization is a cutting-edge DevOps technology which unifies the IT operations and Development domains. In recent times, virtualization using Virtual Machines has become an overkill for its large overhead on systems. As a lightweight alternative, containerization offers containers that constitute a package of an application along with all its dependencies that is required for it to execute. Containerization platforms help in building containers from images. Docker is a widely popular containerization platform. Containerization Orchestration tools manage these containers. Kubernetes is the front-runner of the emerging market of container orchestration tools. These software work together seamlessly in order to successfully implement containerization both locally and on the cloud. In this paper, we aim to deploy the container orchestration tool Kubernetes on a local system with a Docker sample container. The purpose of this is to ensure that all the configurations and management needed for a Docker container is set successfully on the local system before it is deployed onto the cloud or on the premise. The on-premise deployment use case is very important in domains such as finance and healthcare where organizations hesitate to upload confidential information on to the cloud for security reasons but still require scaling of their applications.

Edge computing is a viable approach to improve service delivery and performance parameters by extending the cloud with resources placed closer to a given service environment. Numerous research papers in the literature have already identified the key benefits of this architectural approach. However, most results are based on simulations performed in closed network environments. This paper aims to analyze the existing implementations of processing environments containing edge resources, taking into account the targeted quality of service (QoS) parameters and the utilized orchestration platforms. Based on this analysis, the most popular edge orchestration platforms are evaluated in terms of their workflow that allows the inclusion of remote devices in the processing environment and their ability to adapt the logic of the scheduling algorithms to improve the targeted QoS attributes. The experimental results compare the performance of the platforms and show the current state of their readiness for edge computing in real network and execution environments. These findings suggest that Kubernetes and its distributions have the potential to provide effective scheduling across the resources on the network's edge. However, some challenges still have to be addressed to completely adapt these tools for such a dynamic and distributed execution environment as edge computing implies.

The Cloud Computing paradigm promoted the outsourcing of IT infrastructure and enterprise applications paving the way to save costs of building and maintaining computing infrastructures on-premise. In this environment, scale up of applications to attend demands in high peaks become easier and highly automated. Virtualization was a key technology to enable these characteristics. Nowadays, Container technology became popular as an alternative to Virtual Machines, and is being widely applied, as a consequence, Orchestration tools are being extensively applied in the Cloud environment. Despite its success, when it comes to the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing falls short to meet several requirements. Fog Computing appear as a complimentary technology to the Cloud to deliver the missing requirements in the IoT scene. Managing services deployed in a Fog Environment is a complex task and infrastructure management and orchestration tools can make it seamless. In this paper, we evaluate how Containers can affect the overall performance of applications in Fog Nodes. We analyze different Container Orchestration tools and how they meet Fog requirements to run applications. We also propose a Container Orchestration Framework for Fog Computing infrastructures.

Proactive auto-scaling technique for web applications in container-based edge computing using federated learning model

Fog computing emerged as a new computing paradigm which moves the computing power to the proximity of users, from core to the edge of the network. It is known as the extension of Cloud computing and it offers inordinate opportunities for real-time and latency-sensitive IoT applications. An IoT application consists of a set of dependent Processing Elements (PEs) defined as operations performed on data streams and can be modeled as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Each PE performs a variety of low-level computation on the incoming data such as aggregation or filtering. A key challenge is to decide how to distribute such PEs over the resources, in order to minimize the overall response time of the entire PE graph. This problem is known as distributed PE scheduling and placement problem. In this work, we try to address the question of how fog computing paradigm can help reducing the IoT application response time by efficiently distributing PE graphs over the Fog-Cloud continuum. We mathematically formulate the fundamental characteristics of IoT application and Fog infrastructure, then model the system as an optimization problem using Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) meta-heuristic technique. Our proposed GSA model is evaluated by comparing it with a well-known evolutionary algorithm in the literature via simulation. Also, a comparative analysis with the legacy cloud infrastructure is done in order to show the significant impact of fog presence on the performance of PE processing. Evaluation of our model demonstrates the efficiency of our approach comparing to the current literature.

Geo-distributed efficient deployment of containers with Kubernetes