Enabling Automated Service Orchestration in a Computing Continuum with User-Owned Devices

The urgency in the adoption of the Computing Continuum paradigm, which allows computing services to be de-ployed closer to users, requires a plethora of powerful, distributed devices that host such services. In this context, user-owned devices, such as phones or gaming devices, massively distributed by nature and experiencing a continuous growth in computing resources, are naturally fit to host services, and thus, their incorporation to the Continuum to provide the urgently needed infrastructural support is inevitable. In this future, two key challenges must be addressed: automating service orchestration across a massive number of devices, and ensuring device owners maintain agency over the circumstances and conditions under which services can be hosted on their devices and consumed by other users. As a first step towards this future, we present Atmos, an automated service orchestration platform for integrating user-owned devices in the Computing Continuum. Atmos enforces user-defined policies, automatically adjusting the placement and replication of services across devices. The evaluation of Atmos shows that it enforces all user policies, compared to state-of-the-art service orchestration systems, which violate up to 90.3% of user policies, with minimal impact on the experienced QoS.