Container Data Item: An Abstract Datatype for Efficient Container-based Edge Computing

TL;DR

This paper introduces Container Data Item (CDI), an abstract datatype enabling multiple containers to efficiently share and operate on common data while maintaining strong security and isolation, supporting microservice applications across servers.

Contribution

The paper proposes CDI, a novel datatype that facilitates secure, efficient shared data operations among containers with ownership transfer, including three implementation variants for different deployment scenarios.

Findings

CDI enables secure, efficient shared data access among containers.

Performance evaluation shows CDI's low overhead and high scalability.

Applications demonstrate CDI's effectiveness in augmented reality and workflow orchestration.

Abstract

We present Container Data Item (CDI), an abstract datatype that allows multiple containers to efficiently operate on a common data item while preserving their strong security and isolation semantics. Application developers can use CDIs to enable multiple containers to operate on the same data, synchronize execution among themselves, and control the ownership of the shared data item during runtime. These containers may reside on the same server or different servers. CDI is designed to support microservice based applications comprised of a set of interconnected microservices, each implemented by a separate dedicated container. CDI preserves the important isolation semantics of containers by ensuring that exactly one container owns a CDI object at any instant and the ownership of a CDI object may be transferred from one container to another only by the current CDI object owner. We present three different implementations of CDI that allow different containers residing on the same server as well containers residing on different servers to use CDI for efficiently operating on a common data item. The paper provides an extensive performance evaluation of CDI along with two representative applications, an augmented reality application and a decentralized workflow orchestrator.