BumbleBee: Application-aware adaptation for edge-cloud orchestration

Abstract

Modern developers rely on container-orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes to deploy and manage hybrid workloads that span the edge and cloud. When network conditions between the edge and cloud change unexpectedly, a workload must adapt its internal behavior. Unfortunately, container-orchestration frameworks do not offer an easy way to express, deploy, and manage adaptation strategies. As a result, fine-tuning or modifying a workload's adaptive behavior can require modifying containers built from large, complex codebases that may be maintained by separate development teams. This paper presents BumbleBee, a lightweight extension for container-orchestration frameworks that separates the concerns of application logic and adaptation logic. BumbleBee provides a simple in-network programming abstraction for making decisions about network data using application semantics. Experiments with a BumbleBee prototype show that edge ML-workloads can adapt to network variability and survive disconnections, edge stream-processing workloads can improve benchmark results between 37.8% and $\boldsymbol{23\mathrm{x}}$, and HLS video-streaming can reduce stalled playback by 77%.