EdgeWeaver: Accelerating IoT Application Development Across Edge-Cloud Continuum
This addresses the problem of complex and costly IoT application development for developers in Edge-Cloud environments, representing a strong specific gain rather than a foundational advancement.
The paper tackles the limitations of current Function-as-a-Service platforms for IoT applications across the Edge-Cloud continuum by introducing EdgeWeaver, which boosts development productivity by 31% and achieves 9 nines availability, 10,000X higher than the current standard, with negligible performance impact.
The rise of complex, latency-sensitive IoT applications across the Edge-Cloud continuum exposes the limitations of current Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms in seamlessly addressing the complexity, heterogeneity, and intermittent connectivity of Edge-Cloud environments. Developers are left to manage integration and Quality of Service (QoS) enforcement manually, rendering application development complicated and costly. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the EdgeWeaver platform that offers a unified "object" abstraction that is seamlessly distributed across the continuum to encapsulate application logic, state, and QoS. EdgeWeaver automates "class" deployment across edge and cloud by composing established distributed algorithms (e.g., Raft, CRDTs)-enabling developers to declaratively express QoS (e.g., availability and consistency) desires that, in turn, guide internal resource allocation, function placement, and runtime adaptation to fulfill them. We implement a prototype of EdgeWeaver and evaluate it under diverse settings and using human subjects. Results show that EdgeWeaver boosts development productivity by 31%, while declaratively enforcing strong consistency and achieving 9 nines availability, 10,000X higher than the current standard, with negligible performance impact.