Containers

In this section, we will cover the importance of using containers when developing applications and services. You will learn about how this innovation propelled edge computing to wide adoption. We will briefly discuss serverless computing (AKA cloud functions), and we will touch on the promise of Wasm and the Wasm System Interface (WASI) for edge computing.

As mentioned in Chapter 1’s Cloud-out versus edge-in section, software development for edge computing benefitted greatly from the best practices developed for the cloud environment. A large aspect of that benefit was the use of service-oriented (SO) software architectures, followed by containerization.

Containerized applications use principles of isolation and abstraction to remove some host and operating system dependencies from the packaged applications that need to run in those environments. This also allows applications with conflicting dependencies to run on the same host without contention. This abstraction...