2022/09/02 by Merlijn Sebrechts, Tim Ramlot, Sebrechts, Merlijn +9
Computer Science · #Advanced Data Storage Technologies #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques #Performance (cs.PF) #Security and Verification in Computing #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2209.01077
openalex publication_date 2022/09/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Kubernetes' high resource requirements hamper its adoption in constrained environments such as the edge and fog. Its extensible control plane is a significant contributor to this, consisting of long-lived processes called "controllers" that constantly listen for state changes and use resources even when they are not needed. This paper presents a WebAssembly-based framework for running lightweight controllers on-demand, only when they are needed. This framework extends the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), in order to run Kubernetes controllers as lightweight Wasm modules. The framework runs these Wasm controllers in a modified version of Wasmtime, the reference WebAssembly (Wasm) runtime, that swaps idle controllers to disk and activates them when needed. A thorough evaluation shows this framework achieves a 64% memory reduction compared to traditional container-based controller frameworks.