A Watchdog Service Making Container-Based Micro-services Reliable in IoT Clouds

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud computing has brought the rising of IoT Clouds able to provide different kinds of IoT as a Service solutions consisting of various micro-services deployed in IoT devices (including sensors and actuators) interacting with different Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as Service (i.e., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) running in the Clouds' data centres. On the basis of IoT Clouds the container virtualisation is becoming an even more prominent technology that allows them to deploy and manage, in a flexible fashion, micro-services within IoT devices. In this paper, we specifically focus on micro-service reliability in IoT devices. In particular, we propose a system based on container virtualisation that allows IoT Clouds to carry out fault-tolerance when a micro-service running on an IoT device fails. Experiments prove that the overheard introduced in our system by container virtualisation does not negatively affect performances when a micro-service is replaced due to a failure.