Simulating FaaS Orchestrations In The Cloud-Edge Continuum

Deploying Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) applications to resources in the Cloud-Edge continuum calls for suitable simulation environments to assess new proposals for managing those applications while accounting for their specificity, i.e. ephemeral deployment and orchestrated execution. Indeed, exploiting real infrastructures for extensive experiments, while considering heterogeneous nodes and different applications, is costly and time-consuming. In this article, we propose a novel open-source discrete-time simulator for the management (i.e. deployment and migration) of orchestrated FaaS in the Cloud-Edge continuum. It enables assessing customised management policies against varying infrastructure conditions. It collects data about execution time, energy consumption, and successes/failures of management operations. We illustrate the prototype at work over a lifelike case study.