Performance Analysis of Object Store Systems in a Fog/Edge Computing Infrastructures

Fog/Edge computing infrastructures have been proposed as an alternative of current Cloud Computing facilities to address the latency issue that prevents the development of several applications. The main idea is to deploy smaller datacenters at the edge of the backbone in order to bring Cloud computing resources closer to the end-usages. While couple of works illustrated the advantages of such infrastructures in particular for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the way of designing elementary services that can take advantage of such massively distributed infrastructures has not been yet discussed. In this paper, we propose to deal with such a question from the storage point of view. First, we propose a list of properties a storage system should meet in this context. Second, we evaluate through performance analysis three "off-the-shelf" object store solutions, namely Rados, Cassandra and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). In particular, we focused (i) on access times to push and get objects under different scenarios and (ii) on the amount of network traffic that is exchanged between the different sites during such operations. Experiments have been conducted using the Yahoo Cloud System Benchmark (YCSB) on top of the Grid' 5000 testbed. We show that among the three tested solutions IPFS fills most of the criteria expected for a Fog/Edge computing infrastructure.