Advanced Serverless Edge Computing

Serverless computing is becoming an attractive means to implement applications on top of edge infrastructures. Developers break applications into small components (functions), and this modularity allows one to cope with the limited resources of edge nodes and meet the stringent response times typical of edge applications. Different frameworks already support serverless edge computing, that is, the management and operation of serverless applications on top of edge infrastructures, but they usually cope with the different problems in isolation: for example, function placement, dependency management, cold starts, data management, and resource allocation. In contrast, we claim that these aspects must be dealt with all together. This work borrows from NEPTUNE and aims to fill the gap. We plan to complement NEPTUNE with dependency-aware function placement and resource allocation, to tackle image instantiation and cold start mitigation, and to address data management. The first results on the use of function dependencies to amelio-rate resource allocation indicate significant improvements with respect to the state of the art.