Layered Structure Aware Dependent Microservice Placement Toward Cost Efficient Edge Clouds

Although the containers are featured by light-weightness, it is still resource-consuming to pull and startup a large container image, especially in relatively resource-constrained edge cloud. Fortunately, Docker, as the most widely used container, provides a unique layered architecture that allows the same layer to be shared between microservices so as to lower the deployment cost. Meanwhile, it is highly desirable to deploy dependent microservices of an application together to lower the operation cost. Therefore, the balancing of microservice deployment cost and the operation cost should be considered comprehensively to achieve minimal overall cost of an on-demand application. In this paper, we first formulate this problem into a Quadratic Integer Programming form (QIP) and prove it as a NP-hard problem. We further propose a Randomized Rounding-based Microservice Deployment and Layer Pulling (RR-MDLP) algorithm with low computation complexity and guaranteed approximation ratio. Through extensive experiments, we verify the high efficiency of our algorithm by the fact that it significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art microservice deployment strategies.