Battle of Microservices: Towards Latency-Optimal Heuristic Scheduling for Edge Computing

Edge computing paradigm aims at offloading microservices from mobile devices to the edge of network, reducing latency and increasing computational ability. Differently from the monolithic architecture, in a microservice-based system, an application is developed as a suite of microservices, each running independently on containers. To optimize the offloading decision, existing schemes often require a priori knowledge of the service type, latency-requirement, or both. Such limitations, in turn, hinders the quality-of-service (QoS) for real-time (mobile) applications. This paper presents FLAVOUR, a novel distributed and latency-optimal microservice scheduling mechanism for edge computing platform to achieve minimal service latency, while providing guaranteed transmission rates to minimize microservice completion times (MSCT). To design FLAVOUR, we first formulate a stochastic service delay minimization problem with constraints on MSCT and network stability. By solving this problem, we derive an optimal latency-optimal heuristic scheduling problem, which establishes the theoretical foundation for FLAVOUR. We have implemented a FLAVOUR prototype and evaluated FLAVOUR through both the testbed experiments and CloudSim simulations. Our preliminary results show that FLAVOUR holds great promise in terms of latency and throughput under different traffic dynamics.