Edge computing enables new types of services which operate at the network edge. There are important use cases in pervasive computing, ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) for edge computing. In this demo paper we present microclouds deployed at the networks edge in the Guifi.net community network leveraging an open extensible platform called Cloudy. The demonstration focuses on the following aspects: The usage of Cloudy for end users, the services of Cloudy to build microclouds, and the application scenarios of IoT data management within microclouds.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Freitag, Fèlix

Navarro Moldes, Leandro

Pueyo Centelles, Roger

English

UPCommons (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)

Building Microclouds at the Network Edge with theCloudy PlatformFelix Freitag, Roger Pueyo, Leandro NavarroDepartment of Computer Architecture. Technical University of Catalunya. Barcelona, Spain{felix, rpueyo, leandro}@ac.upc.eduAbstract—Edge computing enables new types of services whichoperate at the network edge. There are important use cases inpervasive computing, ambient intelligence and the Internet ofThings (IoT) for edge computing. In this demo paper we presentmicroclouds deployed at the networks edge in the Guifi.netcommunity network leveraging an open extensible platform calledCloudy. The demonstration focuses on the following aspects:The usage of Cloudy for end users, the services of Cloudy tobuild microclouds, and the application scenarios of IoT datamanagement within microclouds.Index Terms—edge computing; community clouds;I. INTRODUCTIONImportant use cases in the Internet of Things (IoT) withhuge business potential drive edge computing research anddeployment. Societal needs to achieve through smart citiesand smart homes more sustainable solutions supported bydistributed ICT infrastructures. Edge computing is alreadyapplied in many industrial and consumer-oriented scenarios.In edge computing an additional infrastructure layer isadded to the cloud infrastructure by by placing computingdevices at the network edge. On these edge devices, specificfunctions are performed as part of a cloud service leveragingtheir closeness to the users or the data source.Vendor solutions provide edge computing platforms to solvespecific requirements. In order to satisfy new user require-ments, the possibility of extending edge devices with addi-tional services, however, should also be provided. For instance,in the scenario of smart homes, it must be possible to addevolving privacy and security needs to a given service solution,which could be enabled through an open edge computingplatform.Edge devices, however, have limited resource capabilities.While data center resources do provide elasticity, an edgedevices cannot scale to workloads which exceed its capacity.One solution to this situation is trying to split larger taskand outsource non-critical parts to data centers [2]. Anotherapproach, which we present here, is to improve edge deviceelasticity by microclouds, which pool edge resources and,through an open software platform, allow service providersand end users to run edge-centric services.In this demo paper, we present edge microclouds built withthe Cloudy platform1. Our approach brings together the con-cepts of community cloud computing [1] and edge computing1http://cloudy.community/[3], materialized as microclouds which are deployed in theGuifi.net community network2.II. MICROCLOUDS AT THE NETWORK EDGEA. Microclouds in Guifi.netFigure 1 illustrates the concept of microclouds. Differenthardware devices are used as nodes to build the microclouds.These microclouds consist of interconnected edge nodes whichallow to share resources and services among its users. Differ-ent to Fog computing [5], where the Fog device establishesa vertical interconnection with data center services, in themicroclouds the cloud is formed horizontally among edgedevices. The cloud nodes are spread over the edge networkat different geographic locations. An important feature of themicrocloud infrastructure is that it is not bound to a certainnumber of devices, but grows organically by every new nodethat is added to the microcloud infrastructure.We demonstrate microclouds by an deployment in theGuifi.net community network. Community networks consist ofIP-based communication networks which local communities ofcitizens build and operate by themselves. Often they providingInternet access to the population of areas which are unattendedby commercial telecom operators. Guifi.net is the communitynetwork where we deployed the microcloud infrastructure.With more than 30000 nodes, Guifi.net can be consideredthe largest community network worldwide. Devices which arepart of the microclouds consist mostly of mini-PCs, which arelocated at end user premises, but also of some desktop PCs,which are mainly in municipality buildings.B. The Cloudy distributionThe software, which we have developed to build mi-croclouds is a Debian-based Linux platform called Cloudy.Cloudy can be obtained from public repositories3. The Cloudydistribution is installed on each of the devices connected to themicrocloud.Service extensions are possible. While there is a pre-configured set of services integrated in the Cloudy distribution,the microcloud formed by the Cloudy platform is open toprovide new services contributed by its users. The Guificommunity cloud currently runs on around thirty devices.2http://guifi.net/3https://github.com/Clommunity/Data managementData analyticsData storageData analyticsIoT board sensor data SensorsEdge Community CloudMicrocloudFig. 1. Edge microcloud on heterogeneous hardware for IoT applications.Instantaneous information on services and devices can beobtained at any moment from a publicly available Cloudyinstance.III. IOT SCENARIO FOR MICROCLOUDSA. Service provision with Docker containersFor Cloudy we have chosen Docker as technology tosupport users with the means to achieve personalization andcustomized service deployments. The Cloudy user can find alist of pre-configured applications available that can be startedin Docker containers. These applications can be installed andun-installed with a click on the Web interface. The user canalso choose if these applications should be published, andtherefore potentially shared, with the users of the microcloud.B. Cloudy usageServices in Cloudy are configured through its GUI. Theintegration of Docker in the Cloudy GUI targets at achievingan end user-friendly Docker configuration and control. Tothis end, the approach we followed is to hide the technicalcomplexity of the Docker usage behind graphical Web inter-faces, more suitable for end users. Therefore, flexible serviceprovision is achieved by leveraging Docker containers, whichthe integrating in Cloudy has made accessible to be used byend-users [1].Figure 2) shows a screenshot, where five main types ofservices can be observed. From top left side of Figure 2)these are: 1) Search, 2) Guifi.net, 3) Personal cloud, 4)Community cloud and 5) Enterprise cloud. Specifically in theEnterprise cloud, applications available as Docker images canbe launched.Figure 2 shows the MQTT Mosquitto broker deployed asDocker container and available as service in the microcloud.While this broker is available for IoT data publishers andsubscribers, it is interesting to note that this service is madeavailable within the microcloud to support users with IoT datamanagement.Fig. 2. The Search service finds the Mosquitto broker deployed as Dockercontainer.Figure 1 illustrates other components with which a local mi-crocloud could support IoT data management. While specificplatform such as a storage service implemented through Tahoe-LAFS is already available in Cloudy, other functions such asmachine learning may become available for the network edgein the near future as to current research in deep learning [4] .IV. EXPERIMENTATIONThe experimentation with the presented microclouds can bedone from the following perspectives:1) Live access to the microcloud in Guifi.net, as seenby the community network cloud user who hosts aCloudy node4. By connecting to the Web-GUI of Cloudyinstances, the cloud instances and services deployed inthe Guifi.net microcloud can be explored.2) Installation to build a Cloudy node and experimentationwith the services to support microclouds.3) Service extensions to support specific scenarios such asIoT.ACKNOWLEDGMENTThis work was partially supported by the European Union’sHorizon 2020 research and innovation programme under theproject netCommons (H2020-688768), the project FIESTA(H2020-643943), and by the Spanish government under con-tract TIN2016-77836-C2-2-R.REFERENCES[1] R. Baig, F. Freitag, and L. Navarro, “Fostering collaborative edge serviceprovision in community clouds with docker,” in 2016 IEEE InternationalConference on Computer and Information Technology (CIT), Dec 2016,pp. 560–567.[2] N. Powers and T. Soyata, “Axaas (acceleration as a service): Can thetelecom service provider rent a cloudlet?” in 2015 IEEE 4th InternationalConference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet), Oct 2015, pp. 232–238.[3] W. Shi and S. Dustdar, “The promise of edge computing,” Computer,vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 78–81, May 2016.[4] S. Teerapittayanon, B. McDanel, and H. T. Kung, “Distributed deep neuralnetworks over the cloud, the edge and end devices,” in 2017 IEEE 37thInternational Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS),June 2017, pp. 328–339.[5] B. Varghese, N. Wang, D. S. Nikolopoulos, and R. Buyya, “Feasibility offog computing,” CoRR, vol. abs/1701.05451, 2017. [Online]. Available:http://arxiv.org/abs/1701.054514Access is available through a publicly available Cloudy instance at http://demo.cloudy.clommunity/, with login guest:guest.

Building microclouds at the network edge with the Cloudy platform

UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC

Edge computing enables new types of services which operate at the network edge. There are important use cases in pervasive computing, ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) for edge computing. In this demo paper we present microclouds deployed at the networks edge in the Guifi.net community network leveraging an open extensible platform called Cloudy. The demonstration focuses on the following aspects: The usage of Cloudy for end users, the services of Cloudy to build microclouds, and the application scenarios of IoT data management within microclouds.Peer Reviewe

Building microclouds at the network edge with the Cloudy platform

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