  The emerging trend of edge computing has led several cloud providers to
release their own platforms for performing computation at the 'edge' of the
network. We compare two such platforms, Amazon AWS Greengrass and Microsoft
Azure IoT Edge, using a new benchmark comprising a suite of performance
metrics. We also compare the performance of the edge frameworks to cloud-only
implementations available in their respective cloud ecosystems. Amazon AWS
Greengrass and Azure IoT Edge use different underlying technologies, edge
Lambda functions vs. containers, and so we also elaborate on platform features
available to developers. Our study shows that both of these edge platforms
provide comparable performance, which nevertheless differs in important ways
for key types of workloads used in edge applications. Finally, we discuss
several current issues and challenges we faced in deploying these platforms.
