The Nanoservices Framework: Co-Locating Microservices in the Cloud-Edge Continuum

Today, the microservices paradigm has emerged as one of the most widely adopted patterns to develop, package, and deploy software on a large scale. However, as they were originally designed for the cloud, the direct application of microservices DevOps practices to resource-constrained environments like the Edge may not be optimal. Specifically, deploying each piece of software as an individual microservice may result in a significant resource footprint (e.g., storage space and network bandwidth related to managing base images, CPU, and memory). In this work, we explore the concept of opportunistically grouping microservice code within the same container to reduce resource footprint when deploying multiple microservices at the Edge. To materialize this concept, we present the N anoservices framework: a framework that formalizes and provides practical means for developers to build and deploy groups of microservices on the same container (a.k.a., Nanoservices). Our early results show that with Nanoservices we can achieve a significant resource footprint reduction (base image storage, CPU, memory) with minimal effort from the developer's viewpoint.