A Low-code Development Framework for Cloud-native Edge Systems

Customizing and deploying an edge system are time-consuming and complex tasks because of hardware heterogeneity, third-party software compatibility, diverse performance requirements, and so on. In this article, we present TinyEdge, a holistic framework for the low-code development of edge systems. The key idea of TinyEdge is to use a top-down approach for designing edge systems. Developers select and configure TinyEdge modules to specify their interaction logic without dealing with the specific hardware or software. Taking the configuration as input, TinyEdge automatically generates the deployment package and estimates the performance with sufficient profiling. TinyEdge provides a unified development toolkit to specify module dependencies, functionalities, interactions, and configurations. We implement TinyEdge and evaluate its performance using real-world edge systems. Results show that: (1) TinyEdge achieves rapid customization of edge systems, reducing 44.15% of development time and 67.79% of lines of code on average compared with the state-of-the-art edge computing platforms; (2) TinyEdge builds compact modules and optimizes the latent circular dependency detection and message routing efficiency; (3) TinyEdge performance estimation has low absolute errors in various settings.