PULCEO - A Novel Architecture for Universal and Lightweight Cloud-Edge Orchestration

Cloud-edge orchestration manages a large pool of heterogeneous resources to improve latency and bandwidth for real-time use cases. It dynamically places computational resources and applications, usually microservices, at cloud and edge locations to enable low-latency communication. For this complex task, various optimization techniques have emerged over recent years. However, the majority implement custom and prototypical infrastructures for evaluation. This limits the general applicability, reusability, and comparability. Therefore, our work wants to contribute a universal and lightweight cloud-edge orchestration platform that fully decouples the optimization logic from the infrastructure. We analyzed the state-of-the-art cloud-edge orchestration and designed a generic cloud-edge orchestration platform. Besides the scientific perspective, we aligned our proposal to the OpenFog Reference Architecture to consider a perspective also from the industry. Therefore, our conceptually designed platform is based on the perspective of both academia and industry. We conclude that our platform can foster advanced cloud-edge orchestration techniuues' general applicability, reusability, and comparability.