OpenFog-Compliant Application-Aware Platform: A Kubernetes Extension

Abstract

Distributed computing paradigms have evolved towards low latency and highly virtualized environments. Fog Computing, as its latest iteration, enables the usage of Cloud-like services closer to the generators and consumers of data. The processing in this layer is performed by Fog Applications, which are decomposed into smaller components following the microservice paradigm and encapsulated into containers. Current state-of-the-art container orchestrators can manage hundreds of simultaneous containers. However, Kubernetes, being the de facto standard, does not consider the application itself as a top-level entity, which limits its orchestration capabilities. This raises the need to rearchitect Kubernetes to benefit from application-awareness, which refers to an orchestration method optimized for managing the applications and the set of components that comprise them. Thus, this paper proposes an application-aware and OpenFog-compliant architecture that manages applications as first-level entities during their lifecycle. Furthermore, the proposed architecture allows the definition of organizational structures to group subordinated applications based on user-defined hierarchies. This logical structuring makes it possible to outline how orchestration should be shaped to reflect the operating model of a system or an organization. The proposed architecture is implemented as a Kubernetes extension and provided as an operator.