Fault-tolerant Permanent Storage for Container-based Fog Architectures

Container-based architectures are widely used for cloud computing and can have an important role in the implementation of fog computing infrastructures. However, there are some crucial dependability aspects that must be addressed to make containerization suitable for critical fog applications, e.g., in automation and robotics. This paper discusses challenges in applying containerization at the fog layer, and focuses on one of those challenges: provision of fault-tolerant permanent storage. The paper also presents a container-based fog architecture utilizing so-called storage containers, which combine built-in fault-tolerance mechanisms of containers with a distributed consensus protocol to achieve data consistency.