Towards Enabling Serverless Computing Across the Edge-Cloud Continuum
Abstract
In recent years, serverless computing has emerged as a transformative paradigm for building and deploying applications without the burden of managing traditional server infrastructure. Concurrently, edge computing has gained traction as a critical solution to reduce latency and enhance real-time data processing by bringing computation closer to data sources. However, while integrating these two powerful concepts – serverless and edge computing – has historically posed challenges, recent advancements have showcased the feasibility of running serverless platforms within edge environments. This paper introduces Knative Edge, a novel serverless platform that seamlessly orchestrates the deployment of serverless functions across both edge devices and cloud environments. Knative Edge leverages the unique characteristics of edge computing, such as proximity to data and reduced network latency, while harnessing the scalability and flexibility of serverless computing. By combining these two paradigms, Knative Edge empowers developers to build highly responsive and efficient applications that span the cloud-edge continuum. We present the architectural design, key components, and deployment workflow of Knative Edge, and provide experimental results showcasing its performance benefits. Our results demonstrate that Knative Edge can make efficient use of both cloud and edge resources by dynamically offloading function executing from the edge to the cloud periods of high activity, while reducing the overall application latency and increasing request throughput compared to an edge-only deployment.
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