FogStore: Toward a Distributed Data Store for Fog Computing

TL;DR

FogStore introduces a system that adapts distributed data stores for Fog Computing by optimizing replica placement and consistency, enhancing reliability and scalability of stateful applications at the network edge.

Contribution

The paper presents FogStore, a system that enables existing DDSs to be tailored for Fog Computing through novel placement and consistency strategies.

Findings

Improved reliability and scalability in Fog environments

Transparent integration with existing DDSs

Enhanced performance demonstrated via Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark

Abstract

Stateful applications and virtualized network functions (VNFs) can benefit from state externalization to increase their reliability, scalability, and inter-operability. To keep and share the externalized state, distributed data stores (DDSs) are a powerful tool allowing for the management of classical trade-offs in consistency, availability and partitioning tolerance. With the advent of Fog and Edge Computing, stateful applications and VNFs are pushed from the data centers toward the network edge. This poses new challenges on DDSs that are tailored to a deployment in Cloud data centers. In this paper, we propose two novel design goals for DDSs that are tailored to Fog Computing: (1) Fog-aware replica placement, and (2) context-sensitive differential consistency. To realize those design goals on top of existing DDSs, we propose the FogStore system. FogStore manages the needed adaptations in replica placement and consistency management transparently, so that existing DDSs can be plugged into the system. To show the benefits of FogStore, we perform a set of evaluations using the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark.