On the Importance of Container Image Placement for Service Provisioning in the Edge

Abstract - Edge computing promises to extend Clouds by moving computation close to data sources to facilitate short-running and low-latency applications and services. Providing fast and predictable service provisioning time presets a new and mounting challenge, as the scale of Edge-servers grows and the heterogeneity of networks between them increases. This paper is driven by a simple question: can we place container images across Edge-servers in such a way that an image can be retrieved to any Edge-server fast and in a predictable time. To this end, we present KCBP and KCBP-WC, two container image placement algorithms which aim to reduce the maximum retrieval time of container images. KCBP and KCBP-WC are based on k-Center optimization. However, KCBP-WC tries to avoid placing large layers of a container image on the same Edge-server. Evaluations using trace-driven simulations show that KCBP and KCBP-WC can be applied to various network configurations and reduce the maximum retrieval time of container images by 1.1x to 4x compared to state-of-the-art placements (i.e., Best-Fit and Random).

Simulator source code is available here