Model-based fleet deployment of edge computing applications

Edge computing brings software in close proximity to end users and IoT devices. Given the increasing number of distributed Edge devices with various contexts, as well as the widely adopted continuous delivery practices, software developers need to maintain multiple application versions and frequently (re-)deploy them to a fleet of many devices with respect to their contexts. Doing this correctly and efficiently goes beyond manual capabilities and requires employing an intelligent and reliable automated approach. Accordingly this paper describes a joint research with a Smart Healthcare application provider on a model-based approach to automatically assigning multiple software deployments to hundreds of Edge gateways. From a Platform-Specific Model obtained from the existing Edge computing platform, we extract a Platform-Independent Model that describes a list of target devices and a pool of available deployments. Next, we use constraint solving to automatically assign deployments to devices at once, given their specific contexts. The resulting solution is transformed back to the PSM as to proceed with software deployment accordingly. We validate the approach with a Fleet Deployment prototype integrated into the DevOps toolchain currently used by the application provider. Initial experiments demonstrate the viability of the approach and its usefulness in supporting DevOps in Edge computing applications.