Sustainable Cloud-Edge Infrastructure as a Service

Abstract

Utility computing paradigms (e.g, Fog, Edge, Mist computing) allow application operators to deploy applications onto heterogeneous resources along the infrastructure continuum spanning from virtually unbounded datacenters to resource-constrained Edge and IoT devices. Application operators must suitably select infrastructure resources where to deploy at best the services that compose their applications, and then manage the application life-cycle across the infrastructure. We propose a new view of the Cloud-Edge continuum, where infrastructure providers lease tailored portions of the infrastructure, determined by taking into account the hardware and QoS requirements as well as the sustainability goals expressed by application operators. Most importantly, infrastructure providers offer the selected Cloud-Edge infrastructure portion as a single virtual infrastructure node that customers can exploit to deploy and manage their applications in a seamless way.