Lightweight virtualization (LV) technologies have refashioned the world of software development by introducing flexibility and new ways of managing and distributing software. Edge computing complements today's powerful centralized data centers with a large number of distributed nodes that provide virtualization close to the data source and end users. This emerging paradigm offers ubiquitous processing capabilities on a wide range of heterogeneous hardware characterized by different processing power and energy availability. The scope of this article is to present an in-depth analysis on the requirements of edge computing from the perspective of three selected use cases that are particularly interesting for harnessing the power of the Internet of Things. We discuss and compare the applicability of two LV technologies, containers and unikernels, as platforms for enabling the scalability, security, and manageability required by such pervasive applications that soon may be part of our everyday lives. To inspire further research, we identify open problems and highlight future directions to serve as a road map for both industry and academia.

中文翻译：

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将物联网边缘计算与轻量级虚拟化相整合


轻量级虚拟化 (LV) 技术通过引入灵活性以及管理和分发软件的新方法，重塑了软件开发世界。边缘计算通过大量分布式节点补充了当今强大的集中式数据中心，这些节点提供靠近数据源和最终用户的虚拟化。这种新兴范例在各种异构硬件上提供了无处不在的处理能力，这些硬件具有不同的处理能力和能源可用性。本文的目的是从三个选定的用例的角度对边缘计算的需求进行深入分析，这三个用例对于利用物联网的力量特别有趣。我们讨论并比较了两种 LV 技术（容器和 unikernel）的适用性，作为实现此类普遍应用程序所需的可扩展性、安全性和可管理性的平台，这些应用程序很快可能会成为我们日常生活的一部分。为了激发进一步的研究，我们确定了未解决的问题并强调了未来的方向，作为工业界和学术界的路线图。