Exploiting the Potential of the Edge-Cloud Continuum with Self-distributing Systems

The Edge-Cloud Continuum offers a wide range of adaptive deployment settings for modern applications. However, in order to exploit the full potential of the edge-cloud infrastructure and platforms, applications have to be carefully crafted to be stateless and self-contained in small services or functions, i.e., the opposite of the classic stateful monolithic applications. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach that allows stateful single applications to also exploit the full potential of the edge-cloud continuum. We explore the concept of Self-distributing Systems(SDS) as a general approach for code offloading and as an elastic application-level mechanism for performance scale-out on the edge-cloud continuum. Our preliminary results indicate that SDS enables enough flexibility for applications to fully explore the edge-cloud resource mixture. Particularly, we describe our state management strategies for stateful code mobility; explore SDS as a general mechanism to exploit horizontal scaling on the cloud; and examine SDS as a general code offloading mechanism to move code from edge to cloud, showing the scenarios where our approach enables applications to positively exploit the edgecloud continuum for better performance.