Creating an Edge-to-Cloud Computing Continuum: Status and Perspective

Abstract

The creation of a computing (and storage) continuum that spans across multiple infrastructures has been recently proposed with the aim at breaking the barriers of current cloud computing silos. While the potential of this vision is clear, such as possible energy efficiency improvements, application transparency, better quality of service, the problems in realizing this vision are challenging. In fact, the necessity (a) to consider WAN latencies, network bottlenecks and possible network outages, (b) to support different administrative boundaries (hence, security), (c) to define novel orchestration algorithms are only a first portion of the ingredients required to create this continuum. Even more important are the necessity to achieve an economic sustainability and the necessity to migrate applications to the new paradigm, which are often not considered by the current research efforts. Starting from the experience achieved in the open-source liqo.io project, this talk will introduce the potentials and the challenges in the creation of the edge-to-cloud computing continuum, and it will present what are the major blocking points along our way.