mF2C: The Evolution of Cloud Computing towards an Open and Coordinated Ecosystem of Fogs and Clouds

Fog computing brings cloud computing capabilities closer to the end-devices and users, while enabling location-dependent resource allocation, low latency services, and extending significantly the IoT services portfolio as well as market and business opportunities in the cloud and IoT sectors. With the number of devices growing exponentially globally, new cloud and fog models are expected to emerge, paving the way for shared, collaborative, extensible mobile, volatile and dynamic compute, storage and network infrastructure. When put together, cloud and fog computing create a new stack of resources, which we refer to as Fog-to-Cloud (F2C), creating the need for a new, open and coordinated management ecosystem. The EU Horizon 2020 program has recently funded a new research initiative (mF2C) bringing together relevant industry and academic players in the cloud arena, aimed at designing an open, secure, decentralized, multistakeholder management framework for F2C computing, including novel programming models, privacy and security, data storage techniques, service creation, brokerage solutions, SLA policies, and resource orchestration methods. This paper introduces the main mF2C concepts, illustrates the need for a coordinated management ecosystem, proposes a preliminary design of its foundational building blocks and presents results that show the benefits mF2C may have on three key real-world scenarios