We present an Edge-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform for realising distributed
cloud architectures and integrating the edge of the network in the computing
ecosystem. The EaaS platform is underpinned by (i) a lightweight discovery
protocol that identifies edge nodes and make them publicly accessible in a
computing environment, and (ii) a scalable resource provisioning mechanism for
offloading workloads from the cloud on to the edge for servicing multiple user
requests. We validate the feasibility of EaaS on an online game use-case to
highlight the improvement in the QoS of the application hosted on our
cloud-edge platform. On this platform we demonstrate (i) low overheads of less
than 6%, (ii) reduced data traffic to the cloud by up to 95% and (iii)
minimised application latency between 40%-60%.Comment: 10 pages; presented at the EdgeComp Symposium 2017; will appear in
Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Computing, 201
