Why cloud applications are not ready for the edge (yet)

Mobile Edge Clouds (MECs) are distributed platforms in which distant data-centers are complemented with computing and storage capacity located at the edge of the network. Their wide resource distribution enables MECs to fulfill the need of low latency and high bandwidth to offer an improved user experience. As modern cloud applications are increasingly architected as collections of small, independently deployable services, they can be flexibly deployed in various configurations that combines resources from both centralized datacenters and edge locations. In principle, such applications should therefore be well-placed to exploit the advantages of MECs so as to reduce service response times. In this paper, we quantify the benefits of deploying such cloud micro-service applications on MECs. Using two popular benchmarks, we show that, against conventional wisdom, end-to-end latency does not improve significantly even when most application services are deployed in the edge location. We developed a profiler to better understand this phenomenon, allowing us to develop recommendations for adapting applications to MECs. Further, by quantifying the gains of those recommendations, we show that the performance of an application can be made to reach the ideal scenario, in which the latency between an edge datacenter and a remote datacenter has no impact on the application performance. This work thus presents ways of adapting cloud-native applications to take advantage of MECs and provides guidance for developing MEC-native applications. We believe that both these elements are necessary to drive MEC adoption.