Quality of Service Aware Orchestration for Cloud–Edge Continuum Applications

Funding Information: Funding: This work has been financially supported by the European Commission through the ELASTIC project (H2020 grant agreement 825473), by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (project RTI2018-096116-B-I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE)), and by the Basque Government through the Qualyfamm project (Elkartek KK-2020/00042). It has also been financed by the Basque Government under Grant IT1324-19. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.The fast growth in the amount of connected devices with computing capabilities in the past years has enabled the emergence of a new computing layer at the Edge. Despite being resource-constrained if compared with cloud servers, they offer lower latencies than those achievable by Cloud computing. The combination of both Cloud and Edge computing paradigms can provide a suitable infrastructure for complex applications’ quality of service requirements that cannot easily be achieved with either of these paradigms alone. These requirements can be very different for each application, from achieving time sensitivity or assuring data privacy to storing and processing large amounts of data. Therefore, orchestrating these applications in the Cloud–Edge computing raises new challenges that need to be solved in order to fully take advantage of this layered infrastructure. This paper proposes an architecture that enables the dynamic orchestration of applications in the Cloud– Edge continuum. It focuses on the application’squality of service by providing the scheduler with input that is commonly used by modern scheduling algorithms. The architecture uses a distributed scheduling approach that can be customized in a per-application basis, which ensures that it can scale properly even in setups with high number of nodes and complex scheduling algorithms. This architecture has been implemented on top of Kubernetes and evaluated in order to asses its viability to enable more complex scheduling algorithms that take into account the quality of service of applications.Peer reviewe