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Kathleen Martin
Guest
Figure 1: Latency Sensitivity Across various Edges (source)
Latency being primary driver for edge computing, applications and services need to be developed leveraging the capabilities of edge compute platform. These applications are expected to be cloud native, microservices based, leveraging helper services available on the platform, while providing secure multi-tenant configurations. The partitioning of the functionality must leverage resource awareness in the platform and facilitate performance scalability and security. Mobility and Federation will be important considerations allowing use of services across multiple MEC domains.
Another success factor will be portability across a range of device capabilities, some with hardware acceleration, some without. Paradigm of edge-native applications clearly describe characteristics required for developers to build applications in order to satisfy service offerings at the edge [1]. The reality however is proving to be far more complex for application writers to satisfy plethora of requirements [2].
Where Kubernetes CNI is limited...
Microservice architectures are decoupling applications from maintaining & managing infrastructure operations to only perform required business logic. Infrastructure tasks of moving the data, health checks, rate limiting, etc., are being decoupled from orchestrators like Kubernetes and are being taken up by service mesh using sidecar proxies, forming software defined data plane for microservices.
While Kubernetes has become the orchestrator of choice for microservices, data plane networking has evolved with advent of Container Network Interface (CNI)s such as Calico, Cilium, and OVN4NFV. Applications running as microservices still perform routine infrastructure management tasks such as rate limiting, health checking, L4 to L7 connection management, and TLS termination, which has to be replicated by each of the microservices.
Continue reading: https://www.thefastmode.com/expert-opinion/22946-service-mesh-and-edge-computing-considerations
