A Lightweight Container Design for Microservice-based Industrial Edge Applications

Industrial edge computing turns to run applications on containers for high flexibility and reusability. However, current application containers are not designed for industrial usage and are too heavy, leading to slow distribution speeds. This paper designs a series of rules to build a lightweight container and isolate hardware resources for industry IEC 61499 function blocks. The container works based on Kernel features and runs without unnecessary components for industry. Compared with current containers, such as Docker, this container is designed specifically to meet industrial requirements for real-time and reliable capability and takes up less space to enable industry users to remake and distribute functions more swiftly.