Performance Evaluation of Kubernetes as Deployment Platform for IoT Devices

With the advent of the Internet of Things paradigm, more and more devices and sensors are physically distributed to accomplish many tasks in our daily lives. Edge computing has emerged as a way to migrate part of the storage, data processing, and computation capabilities to the edge devices. Such a migration aims at addressing the challenges regarding communication between IoT devices, pressure on the cloud infrastructure generated by a large amount of data, network complexity, and scalability. As these applications migrate to this new paradigm, issues already addressed on developing traditional software begin to emerge as new challenges. One of these challenges is the deployment process of applications on the edge devices since, in a real scenario, the scale of an IoT platform can be tremendous. In this paper, we discuss the usage of Kubernetes as a platform to enable deployments from the cloud to IoT gateways and conduct a performance evaluation of Kubernetes on two common IoT scenarios. The preliminary results show the potential and feasibility of Kubernetes as a platform for deploying applications on edge devices.