Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Middleware for Edge Clouds & Cloudlets, MECC@Middleware 2017, Las Vegas, USA, December 2017

The Middleware for Edge Clouds & Cloudlets (MECC) workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners addressing how tomake the full stack of modern cloud computing platforms escape outside of mega-datacenters and operate seamlessly across all geographiesand all devices.ere is a growing trend of interactive and more resource-intensive (e.g., compute, storage, need for big data) applications on mobiledevices today, and currently many such applications are powered resorting only to resources provided by mega-datacenters on infrastructuralclouds. is poses increasingly dicult challenges regarding resource costs, application availability, latency, energy and environmentalconcerns.In fact, it is challenging to provide such applications using just cloud resources when there is limited or intermient connectivity.Harvesting the resources present at the edge of the network, on nearby mobile devices and/or cloudlets, is a viable solution to this problem.is approach can also improve latency, reduce costs, and help to contribute to diminish the current incentives for larger and largerdatacenters.Today, there is also increasing demand for middleware that oers higher level abstractions without hampering expressiveness andperformance. However, many distributed systems today are still designed with only datacenters in mind, and their assumptions, such as thatnodes use fast wired interconnects, no longer hold in edge environments. In particular, edge clouds, such as those made up of only mobiledevices at the edge, use unreliable wireless links. ese unreliable links directly translate into unavailability and churn. Simultaneously, sincemobile devices have limited energy resources, heavyweight distributed algorithms, such as coordination using a leader-based consensusprotocol, are impractical.Conversely, as an eort to ooad heavier computation from mobile devices, cloudlets were originally envisioned as server-class hardwaredeployed in neighborhoods, oce buildings or more generally, in close physical proximity to environments with high user density, such asat large public events. It is now adopting more lightweight approaches where the ooading no longer resorts solely to virtual machines, asinitially proposed, where cloudlets can operate as execution environments for lightweight containers and can also provide connectivitysupport to crowd-sourced mobile devices, i.e., edge clouds.With this new trend in sight, the community still needs to dene the services that should be oered at each tier of the edge cloudstack. While cloudlets can provide well-dened APIs to support multiple computation ooading methods, new modular and recongurablearchitectures still have to be proposed to support a variety of deployment scenarios, such as edge clouds without cloudlet support, andscenarios with very limited access to infrastructural clouds.In this second edition, we look forward to the presentations and discussions that may shed light on these challenges. e organizerswould like to thank all the authors, Middleware organizers, chairs, workshop and publicity chairs.