Fog computing out of the box: Dynamic deployment of fog service containers with TOSCA

The conventional cloud-centric Internet of Things (IoT) application fails to meet the latency requirement of time-critical applications. The idea of edge and fog computing arrived to distribute workloads across the fog devices located in the local area. However, achieving seamless interoperability, platform independence, and automatic deployment of services becomes the major challenge over heterogeneous fog devices. This paper proposes an integrated and standards-based fog computing federation framework, FogDEFT, that adapts OASIS–Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) for service deployment in fog. The framework standardizes the distributed application design with TOSCA Service Template to deploy Docker Containers in Swarm mode and manages interoperability over heterogeneous fog devices. The framework uses a lightweight TOSCA compliant orchestrator to dynamically deploy various fog applications (user-developed services) on the fly.