Best Paper Award at CLOSER 2024

Dr. Tom Goethals was awarded the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2024) for his paper "Feather: Lightweight Container Alternatives for Deploying Workloads in the Edge".

Authors: Tom Goethals, Maxim De Clercq, Merlijn Sebrechts, Filip De Turck and Bruno Volckaert, all from Ghent University - imec, IDLab, Gent, Belgium.

About CLOSER 2024

The International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science aims at bringing together engineers, researchers and practitioners interested in advances and applications concerning the cloud infrastructure, operations, and available services through the global network. Further, the conference considers as essential the link to Services Science, acknowledging the service-orientation in most current IT-driven collaborations, and provides a forum for discussing how Services Science can provide theory, methods and techniques to design, analyze, manage, market and study various aspects of Cloud Computing.
CLOSER 2024 was held on May 2-4, 2024 in Angers, France.

About the paper topic

This research presents Feather, a custom Kubernetes agent for low-resource edge nodes which extends clusters to the network edge by leveraging Virtual Kubelet technology. Additionally, it introduces a framework that allows non-container workloads to be packed into OCI images, which can then be stored in a container repository and executed on a suitable backend. Feather implements backends for both container and microVM (OSv unikernel) workloads, and evaluation scenarios including a PaperMC server show that unikernel workloads can be more memory efficient than container workloads, at the cost of some CPU overhead.