MiCADO-Edge: Towards an Application-level Orchestrator for the Cloud-to-Edge Computing Continuum

Automated deployment and run-time management of microservices-based applications in cloud computing environments is relatively well studied with several mature solutions. However, managing such applications and tasks in the cloud-to-edge continuum is far from trivial, with no robust, production-level solutions currently available. This paper presents our first attempt to extend an application-level cloud orchestration framework called MiCADO to utilise edge and fog worker nodes. The paper illustrates how MiCADO-Edge can automatically deploy complex sets of interconnected microservices in such multi-layered cloud-to-edge environments. Additionally, it shows how monitoring information can be collected from such services and how complex, user- defined run-time management policies can be enforced on application components running at any layer of the architecture. The implemented solution is demonstrated and evaluated using two realistic case studies from the areas of video processing and secure healthcare data analysis.