Mobility-Aware Registry Migration for Containerized Applications on Edge Computing Infrastructures.

Small footprints and fast provisioning times have promoted container adoption for deploying and managing applications on edge computing environments. As keeping all container images locally would quickly saturate the storage of resource-constrained edge servers, application provisioning consists of pulling container images from external repositories, called registries, located in specific locations in the infrastructure. Existing research reduces deployment time on edge infrastructures by defining the location of container registries. Although such an approach yields positive results in specific scenarios, it overlooks that the demand for container images in certain regions can vary over time according to users' mobility. This work presents a novel strategy that provisions container registries dynamically based on users' mobility, spinning up new registries when application provisioning times start growing excessively and deprovisioning registries far away from users. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach reduces the application provisioning time issues by 33.19% on average compared to strategies that allocate container registries statically.