H-Container: Enabling Heterogeneous-ISA Container Migration in Edge Computing

Edge computing is a recent computing paradigm that brings cloud services closer to the client. Among other features, edge computing offers extremely low client/server latencies. To consistently provide such low latencies, services should run on edge nodes that are physically as close as possible to their clients. Thus, when the physical location of a client changes, a service should migrate between edge nodes to maintain proximity. Differently from cloud nodes, edge nodes integrate CPUs of different Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs), hence a program natively compiled for a given ISA cannot migrate to a server equipped with a CPU of a different ISA. This hinders migration to the closest node.

We introduce H-Container, a system that migrates natively compiled containerized applications across compute nodes featuring CPUs of different ISAs. H-Container advances over existing heterogeneous-ISA migration systems by being (a) highly compatible – no user’s source-code nor compiler toolchain modifications are needed; (b) easily deployable – fully implemented in user space, thus without any OS or hypervisor dependency, and (c) largely Linux-compliant – it can migrate most Linux software, including server applications and dynamically linked binaries. H-Container targets Linux and its already-compiled executables, adopts LLVM, extends CRIU, and integrates with Docker. Experiments demonstrate that H-Container adds no overheads during program execution, while 10–100 ms are added during migration. Furthermore, we show the benefits of H-Container in real-world scenarios, demonstrating, for example, up to 94% increase in Redis throughput when client/server proximity is maintained through heterogeneous container migration.