Sinfonia: Cross-tier orchestration for edge-native applications

Abstract

The convergence of 5G wireless networks and edge computing enables new edge-native applications that are simultaneously bandwidth-hungry, latency-sensitive, and compute-intensive. Examples include deeply immersive augmented reality, wearable cognitive assistance, privacy-preserving video analytics, edge-triggered serendipity, and autonomous swarms of featherweight drones. Such edge-native applications require network-aware and load-aware orchestration of resources across the cloud (Tier-1), cloudlets (Tier-2), and device (Tier-3). This paper describes the architecture of Sinfonia, an open-source system for such cross-tier orchestration. Key attributes of Sinfonia include: support for multiple vendor-specific Tier-1 roots of orchestration, providing end-to-end runtime control that spans technical and non-technical criteria; use of third-party Kubernetes clusters as cloudlets, with unified treatment of telco-managed, hyperconverged, and just-in-time variants of cloudlets; masking of orchestration complexity from applications, thus lowering the barrier to creation of new edge-native applications. We describe an initial release of Sinfonia (https://github.com/cmusatyalab/sinfonia), and share our thoughts on evolving it in the future.