Orchestration of Containerized Applications in the Cloud Continuum

Cloud Service orchestration is a hot topic addressed by both the academia and the business world. The increasing diversification of the Cloud offer, coupled with the strong need of flexible and scalable applications demanded by customers, is calling up for efficient and agile mechanisms that streamline the devops practices. The novel opportunity of running software applications or just application portions on resources located on the Edge of the network poses an additional challenge to the already tough problem of flexibly and seamlessly provisioning services. Orchestrators must deal with a continuum of heterogeneous computing resources, contributed by both the Edge and the Cloud, that promises several benefits yet at a higher management cost. In this paper, we introduce a continuum-enabled orchestrator and discuss an application provisioning paradigm that helps the users to easily configure and deploy composite applications. Finally, we showcase the potential of the orchestrator in a simple yet practical smart-city scenario.