Community-based placement of registries to speed up application deployment on Edge Computing

The use of virtualization techniques, such as containerization, is rapidly changing how the deployment of applications is performed at the network edge. Indeed, container images enable fast instantiation and small footprint. However, although having smaller size than VMs virtual disks, container images continue to have hundreds of megabytes and can take several seconds to be downloaded in an edge node. In fact, the heterogeneity and resource-constrained infrastructure, typical of an edge computing scenario, can also increase this latency, by the several bottlenecks that may occur on the network topology. We advocate that the use of well-positioned container registries on the topology can significantly improve the deployment process. To prove that, in this paper we focus our analysis on the network requirements of large amounts of container deployments, and the impact generated on two distinct edge topologies. We also present a new registries placement solution based on a fluid communities algorithm. We validated our proposal using simulation and results show that it validates the model and generality of the proposed solution, showing enhanced performance even with biased schedulers with large amounts of deployments in a concentrated set of nodes.