Cost-aware Service Placement and Scheduling in the Edge-Cloud Continuum

The edge to data center computing continuum is the aggregation of computing resources located anywhere between the network edge (e.g., close to 5G antennas), and servers in traditional data centers. Kubernetes is the de facto standard for the orchestration of services in data center environments, where it is very efficient. It, however, fails to give the same performance when including edge resources. At the edge, resources are more limited, and networking conditions are changing over time. In this article, we present a methodology that lowers the costs of running applications in the edge-to-cloud computing continuum. This methodology can adapt to changing environments, e.g., moving end-users. We are also monitoring some Key Performance Indicators of the applications to ensure that cost optimizations do not negatively impact their Quality of Service. In addition, to ensure that performances are optimal even when users are moving, we introduce a background process that periodically checks if a better location is available for the service and, if so, moves the service. To demonstrate the performance of our scheduling approach, we evaluate it using a vehicle cooperative perception use case, a representative 5G application. With this use case, we can demonstrate that our scheduling approach can robustly lower the cost in different scenarios, while other approaches that are already available fail in either being adaptive to changing environments or will have poor cost-effectiveness in some scenarios.