EDGELESS (Cognitive edge-cloud with serverless computing) seeks to make complex Function as a Service (FaaS) application deployment both easy-to-use and flexible, applicable to different environments on an infrastructure composed of heterogeneous physical devices across the edge-cloud continuum. The project realises efficient and transparent horizontal pooling of decentralized resources by implementing the serverless concept over nodes with heterogeneous capabilities ranging from constrained resources, to specialized hardware, to traditional cloud resources. EDGELESS aims to go beyond traditional stateless serverless architectures by allowing functions to maintain and manage state information, offering a flexible and comprehensive solution for which it is easy to develop.
The EDGELESS consortium is working toward three goals.
• Design and implement an event-driven architecture able to manage applications’ dynamic state and scalability. This requires methods to efficiently redistribute computation from user devices and remote datacentres across a diverse infrastructure ecosystem, including edge nodes with heterogeneous computational capabilities. By leveraging an event-driven architecture, the stateful FaaS framework of EDGELESS enables seamless communication and coordination among distributed functions. This promotes efficient handling of events and triggers, enhancing the system’s responsiveness.
• Security and privacy concerns are first-class considerations in EDGELESS. Encryption, access controls, and other security measures are employed to ensure that sensitive data is protected and user privacy is maintained even in a distributed edge-cloud environment. To further enhance privacy and security, EDGELESS will implement secure authentication based on Hardware Security Modules and secure stateful FaaS workflow execution in trusted enclaves.
• Longevity, sustainability, and desirability of the EDGELESS project arises from alignment between developments and a value proposition for edge computing ecosystem actors applying the EDGELESS framework, enabling new use and business cases. On the one hand, the framework emphasises ease of use and improved developer experience by applying standard-compliant and maintainable APIs, and state-of-art tools for the different actors interacting with EDGELESS, e.g. graphical, low-code interfaces. On the other hand, EDGELESS has, from the start, adopted an open-source approach, to facilitate collaboration among developers, researchers, and industry experts, fostering innovation and sustainable development of the EDGELESS cutting-edge FaaS framework.
