When Edge Meets FaaS: Opportunities and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper examines the potential of FaaS-based edge computing, highlighting its benefits and the key research challenges such as application modularity, performance-isolation trade-offs, and distributed scheduling.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the feasibility and advantages of FaaS at the edge, and discusses critical research challenges with evaluations of existing platforms.

Findings

FaaS enhances edge computing flexibility and scalability.

Current platforms face challenges in application decomposition and scheduling.

Trade-offs exist between performance and sandbox isolation in FaaS edge systems.

Abstract

The proliferation of edge devices and the rapid growth of IoT data have called forth the edge computing paradigm. Function-as-a-service (FaaS) is a promising computing paradigm to realize edge computing. This paper explores the feasibility and advantages of FaaS-based edge computing. It also studies the research challenges that should be addressed in the design of such systems, which are 1) the quick decomposing and recomposing of applications, 2) the trade-off between performance and isolation of sandbox mechanisms, and 3) distributed scheduling. The challenges are illustrated by evaluating existing FaaS-based edge platforms, AWS IoT Greengrass, and OpenFaaS.