A Light-Weight Approach to Software Assignment at the Edge

Abstract

Containerised software running on edge infrastructures is required to be updated following agile practices to react to emerging business requirements, contextual changes, and security threats. Which version needs to be deployed on a particular device depends on multiple context properties, such as hardware/software resources, physical environment, user preferences, subscription type, etc. As fleets of edge devices are nowadays comprised of thousands of units, the amount of effort required to perform such assignment often goes beyond manual capabilities, and automating this assignment task is an important pre-requisite for application providers to implement continuous software delivery. This paper looks at this challenge as a generalised assignment problem and demonstrates how it can be solved using simple, yet efficient combinatorial optimisation techniques. The proof of concept implementation demonstrates the general viability of the approach, as well as its performance and scalability through a series of benchmarking experiments.