EdgeX: Edge Replication for Web Applications

Abstract

Global web applications face the problem of high network latency due to their need to communicate with distant data centers. Many applications use edge networks for caching images, CSS, javascript, and other static content in order to avoid some of this network latency. However, for updates and for anything other than static content, communication with the data center is still required, and can dominate application request latencies. One way to address this problem is to push more of the web application, as well the database on which it depends, from the remote data center towards the edge of the network. This thesis presents preliminary work in this direction. Speci cally, it presents an edge-aware dynamic data replication architecture for relational database systems supporting web applications. The objective is to allow dynamic content to be served from the edge of the network, with low latency.