Design and implementation of a platform for stateful agents at the edge

Edge–cloud computing infrastructures are increasingly widespread as they combine the flexibility of cloud-native development tools with the performance and security of distributed computing environments. Function-as-a-Service has emerged as a powerful abstraction that overcomes the limitations of a micro-service architecture. However, it generally does not support stateful functions, making it unsuitable for many practical applications in, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time analytics. In this paper, we explore a novel paradigm, based on stateful asynchronous agents, that goes beyond traditional serverless computing. We focus on several key technical aspects: programming model, deployment procedures, design of a flexible compute node, and state management. We illustrate our paradigm using the EDGELESS platform as a concrete implementation of this stateful agents’ pattern. We report proof-of-concept experiment results obtained in a testbed with heterogeneous resource-constrained edge nodes that showcase some distinguishing features of our platform: scalable management of lightweight function instances, the advantage of keeping the state local at function instances, and delegated orchestration to enable a third-party agent to make migration decisions in a group of local nodes.