Towards Seamless Serverless Computing Across an Edge-Cloud Continuum

Serverless computing has emerged as an attractive paradigm due to the efficiency of development and the ease of deployment without managing any underlying infrastructure. Nevertheless, serverless computing approaches face numerous challenges to unlock their full potential in hybrid environments. To gain a deeper understanding and firsthand knowledge of serverless computing in edge-cloud deployments, we review the current state of open-source serverless platforms and compare them based on predefined requirements. We then design and implement a serverless computing platform with a novel edge orchestration technique that seamlessly deploys serverless functions across the edge and cloud environments on top of the Knative serverless platform. Moreover, we propose an offloading strategy for edge environments and four different functions for experimentation and showcase the performance benefits of our solution. Our results demonstrate that such an approach can efficiently utilize both cloud and edge resources by dynamically offloading functions from the edge to the cloud during high activity, while reducing the overall application latency and increasing request throughput compared to an edge-only deployment.