Sophos: A Framework for Application Orchestration in the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum

Orchestrating distributed applications on the Cloud-to-Edge continuum is a challenging task, because of the continuously varying node computational resources availability and node-to-node network latency and band-width on Edge infrastructure. Although Kubernetes is today the de-facto standard for container orchestration on Cloud data centers, its orchestration and scheduling strategy is not suitable for the management of time critical applications on Edge environments because it does not take into account current infrastructure state during its scheduling decisions. In this work, we present Sophos, a framework that runs on top of the Kubernetes platform in order to implement an effective resource and network-aware microservices scheduling and orchestration strategy. In particular, Sophos extends the Kubernetes control plane with a cluster monitor that monitors the current state of the application execution environment, an application configuration controller that continuously tunes the application configuration based on telemetry data and a custom scheduler that determines the placement for each microservice based on the run time infrastructure and application states. An evaluation of the proposed framework is presented by comparing it with the default Kubernetes orchestration and scheduling strategy.