Edge-Cloud Orchestration: Strategies for Service Placement and Enactment

As devices existing at the edge of the network improve in their processing and data storage capacity, there is increasing potential to host and enact services on such devices. A workflow that was traditionally enacted on a data centre can be fragmented across both edge and data centre hosted resources. The following aspects are investigated in this work: (i) mechanisms for dividing a workflow across edge and cloud/data centre resources; (ii) service hosting environments that can be shared across edge and data centre resources; (iii) performance metrics that can influence service placement and selection. An "edge orchestrator" is a resource manager that makes such decisions on the behalf of a user application, and which may be centralised or distributed. An industry scenarios is used to illustrate decision points that influence such choices within an edge orchestrator. The overall objective considered is the completion of the workflow within some deadline constraint by the edge orchestrator.