Quality of Service Aware Orchestration for Cloud–Edge Continuum Applications

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 resourceconstrained
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’s quality 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.