Self Management of Fog Resources – SeMaFoR

Fog Computing is a new paradigm aiming to decentralize the Cloud by geographically distributing away computation, storage and network resources as well as related services. The main gains are twofold: 1) avoid network bottlenecks and single points of failure; 2) keep the data as close as possible to their sources (e.g., sensors) and to their final usage (i.e., end-users). However, managing resources in such heterogeneous and dynamic large systems is highly challenging and requires fully decentralized solutions for scalability and reliability reasons.
Cloud systems are often designed with a set of centralized autonomic controllers in order to manage without human intervention different levels of Cloud administration. In Fog Computing, the system is much larger, more heterogeneous, unreliable and highly dynamic. This prevents from building a consistent centralized view to take a control decision. Thus, to automatically operate Fog systems, distributed solutions are needed to orchestrate a possibly large number of small autonomic controllers, each one having a local view of their controllable resources.

To address this issue, the laboratories LS2N (IMT Atlantique), LIP6 (Sorbonne Université) and the company Alterway propose a joint project called SeMaFoR (Self Management of Fog Resources).
The overall objective is to propose a generic approach and supporting framework for the autonomic management of Fog systems. To this end, we will address several open challenges:
1. Provide an Architecture Description Language (ADL) for modeling Fog systems and their specific features such as the locality concept, QoS constraints applied on resources and their dependencies, the dynamicity of considered workloads, etc. This ADL should be generic and customizable to address any possible kind of Fog system.
2. Support collaborative decision-making between a fleet of small autonomic controllers distributed over the Fog. Tackling the convergence of local decisions to obtain a shared and consistent decision among these autonomic controllers requires new distributed agreement protocols based on distributed consensus algorithms.
3. Support the automatic generation and coordination of reconfiguration plans between the autonomic controllers. Even if each controller gets a new local target configuration to apply from the consensus, the execution plan of the overall reconfiguration needs to be generated and coordinated to minimize the disruption time and avoid failures.
4. Design and implement a fully open source framework usable in a standalone way or integrated with standard solutions (e.g., Kubernetes). The project targets in particular the future generation of Fog architects, DevOps engineers. We plan to evaluate the solution both on simulated Fog infrastructures as well as real infrastructures.

We identify several impacts and benefits of our contributions. The SeMAFoR project will contribute to:
1: Research advances on large-scale distributed systems. The SeMaFoR project will contribute to the development of new knowledge. Mainly, we will propose a new Architecture Description Language (ADL) adapted to the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of Fog systems, new distributed agreement protocols based on distributed consensus algorithms, as well as capabilities for the automatic generation and orchestration of reconfiguration plans in concurrent/distributed systems.
2: Development of new software for industrial Fog architecture. Many major industry players such as Orange, Cisco or Microsoft are currently investing heavily in Fog computing. The SeMaFoR framework could be directly reused by these industry players.
3: Contribution to a larger adoption of Fog computing in the society. The SeMaFoR project aims at participating to the adoption of Fog computing in the society as a whole. SeMaFoR aims at contributing to the fast emergence of new applications of Fog Computing in different currently domains such as e-Health, smart city or smart factory.