Mobile app users are expecting a constant delivery of service from their mobile apps disregarding their location. This fact results in two major problems for the application developer: a) increased network latency between the client and the backend infrastructure, especially in long distance movements and b) fluctuating load patterns to the backend infrastructure due to the non uniform distribution of user concentration in an area over time.
To battle those two problems, application developers may turn to mixed cloud/edge environments to host the mobile app backends. This allows the dynamic invocation of cloud resources in various locations where the users appear but also the effective distribution of the load between edge and cloud resources.
BASMATI advocates that there is room for improvements in this model, especially with the minimization of the cost of QoS provisioning leveraging on the facts that: a) Cloud providers are not offering the same resources, at the same price and under the same availability in every location; b) the edge resources are not efficiently utilized based on the user concentration.
As such, BASMATI embraced the concept of cloud federation and computation offloading and implemented tools that facilitate the needs of the application developer for the deployment of a mobile application with minimized SLA violations and costs.
Towards this direction, BASMATI implemented the following key-enabling artefacts:
- Tools to dynamically deploy application components across highly heterogeneous resources in mixed multi-cloud/edge environments (Cloud & Edge Providers Management, Resource Broker)
- Decision making tools to proactively deploy application components and optimize resource utilization (Decision Maker, Knowledge Extractor, Federation Data Management, Federation Monitoring)
- A business model for a sustainable cloud federation and tools to support it (Federation Business Logic, Decision Maker)
- A specification of the application characteristics but also requirements that initiates the orchestration of the abovementioned tools (BEAM specification, Application Repository)
