Cheops for the Edge

What is Cheops?

Cheops is a service mesh used to geo-distribute Cloud Applications for Edge computing.

Move your applications from the Cloud to the Edge

The Edge paradigm allows the applications to be executed closer to the user. Latency and privacy concerns are important reasons to motivate the use of Edge infrastructures for applications. But deploying an application to the Edge is different from deploying the same application in a few, well controlled datacenters.

Edge infrastructures imply less resources on each location, increased latency for requests between locations, and more disconnections and failures. However, Cloud applications were not developped with these constraints in mind, and worse, are probably expecting the requests between services to be made on the same location.

To allow the use of Cloud applications to the Edge without changing their code, a solution to geo-distribute them is required.

Cheops is such a solution.

It relies on a fully distributed approach, where the application it geo-distributes is deployed on every sites of the infrastructure, along with Cheops. This way, each instance of the application can run in isolation as it is fully deployed.

But to leverage the entire infrastructure, Cheops allows collaborations between those instances. Three types of collaborations were envisioned to help the users fulfill their needs.

To use these collaborations, a DSL called scope-lang was created to allow users to specify where and how (the scope) they want their application resources to be distributed, for each resource. It is used naturally, using the native command from the application enriched with the scope and sending it to Cheops.