Energy-aware Provisioning of Microservices for Serverless Edge Computing

Serverless edge computing allows for highly efficient resource utilization, reducing the energy footprint of edge data centers. Indeed, the containers can be dynamically created and destroyed, allowing to adapt the workload to the available resources. Creating containers upon arrivals of service requests entails, however, a high start-up latency, which may be unsuitable for time-critical services. As alternative solution, pre-started containers (“warm containers”) are used to decrease start-up latency, but incurring in higher resource costs. In this work, we minimize the energy consumption of the active servers in the data center by optimally managing the various container states while meeting the target delay of the requested services. Further, in light of the problem complexity, we investigate how a simple threshold-based algorithm performs and show that it can closely match the optimum.