Bringing the Cloud to the Edge

Cloud computing has become the new paradigm for computation and service delivery. While traditional data center based cloud computing excels at providing general purpose computation at scale, it is not optimized for edge services which require bounded latency, bandwidth compression between the edge and the core, service resiliency with graceful degradation and access to resources visible only inside the NATed and secured edge networks. These aspects of edge services become increasingly important as the Internet transforms into an Internet of things, with access to edge devices restricted to the local network address space. We present a new model for cloud computing, which we call the Edge Cloud that solves these issues by augmenting the traditional data center cloud model with service nodes placed at the edge. We describe the architecture of the Edge Cloud and its implementation as an overlay hybrid cloud using the industry standard OpenStack cloud management framework. We demonstrate the advantages of Edge Cloud using two prototype edge applications — one which provides highly accurate indoor localization and one which provides scalable and resilient video monitoring, both of which are amongst the new class of applications enabled by the Edge Cloud.