Osmotic Flow Deployment Leveraging FaaS Capabilities

Abstract

Nowadays, the rapid development of emerging Cloud, Fog, Edge, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has accelerated the advancement trends forcing applications and information systems (IS) to evolve. In this hybrid and distributed ecosystem, the management of service heterogeneity is complex, as well as, the service provisioning based on the classification and allocation of suitable computational resources remains a challenge. Osmotic Computing (OC), a new promising paradigm that allows the service migrations ensuring beneficial resource utilization within Cloud, Edge, and Fog Computing environments, was introduced as a potential solution to these issues. Driven by the needs of complex management mitigation, greater agility, flexibility and scalability, this paper aims to propose an innovative OC ecosystem leveraging Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS); there is also introduced the concept of hybrid architectural style combining both microservices and serverless architectures. Furthermore, to support the FaaS-based OC ecosystem, an osmotic flow model for video surveillance in smart cities is presented. To validate the functionality and assess the performance and to further improve the understanding of the usability of the OC flow in real-world applications, several experiments have been carried out.