Virtualizing the Edge of the Cloud: the New Frontier

Over the last two decades, virtualization technologies have turned datacenter infrastructure into multitenant, dynami- cally provisionable, elastic resource, and formed the basis for the wide adoption of cloud computing. Many of todays cloud applications, however, are based on continuous inter- actions with end users and their devices, and the trend is only expected to intensify with the expansion of the Internet of Things. The consequent bandwidth and latency require- ments of these emerging workloads push the cloud bound- ary outside of traditional datacenters, giving rise to an edge tier in the end-device-to-cloud-backend infrastructure. Com- putational resources embedded in anything from standalone microservers to WiFi routers and small cell access points, and their open APIs, present opportunities for deploying ap- plication logic and state closer to where it is being used, addressing both latency and backhaul bandwidth problems. This talk will look at the role that existing virtualization tech- nologies can play in providing in this edge tier the required flexibility, dynamic provisioning and isolation, and will out- line open problems that require development of new solu- tions. We will also discuss the opportunities to leverage these technologies to further deal with the diversity in the end-user device and IoT space.