Charla "Collaborative State Machines: A Better Programming Model for the Cloud-Edge-IoT Continuum"

Abstract
Existing programming models face challenges in addressing dynamic and stateful aspects of modern Cloud-Edge applications. To overcome this weakness, this paper introduces Collaborative State Machines (CSM), a novel approach to facilitate the development of reactive, event-driven, and stateful applications for the Cloud-Edge-IoT continuum. CSM enables the development of applications as a collection of state machines that collaborate autonomously and can be distributed across the layers of the continuum. Key features of CSM include (i) a collaboration mechanism among state machines using events and persistent data; (ii) encapsulation of state by encompassing the inherent state of state machines and persistent data; (iii) actions and service invocations as an integral part of states and state transitions decoupling complex application logic from compute and data processing services; and (iv) an advanced data model supporting the processing of local, static and persistent data with scope and lifetime. We evaluate CSM through two realistic use cases. Our evaluation with a light control use case demonstrates that CSM provides a significant improvement in productivity and costs over a state-of-the-art application development platform (AWS Step Functions). Experiments with a video surveillance use case show that CSM also effectively accommodates the Edge layer, resulting in a lower reaction time (10%) and cost reduction (64x) over a comparable use case implementation using Cloud-IoT versus Cloud-Edge-IoT.