Continuum: Automate Infrastructure Deployment and Benchmarking in the Compute Continuum

Abstract

As the next generation of diverse workloads like autonomous driving and augmented/virtual reality evolves, computation is shifting from cloud-based services to the edge, leading to the emergence of a cloud-edge compute continuum. This continuum promises a wide spectrum of deployment opportunities for workloads that can leverage the strengths of cloud (scalable infrastructure, high reliability), edge (energy efficient, low latencies), and endpoints (sensing, user-owned). Designing and deploying software in the continuum is complex because of the variety of available hardware, each with unique properties and trade-offs. In practice, developers have limited access to these resources, limiting their ability to create software deployments. To simplify research and development in the compute continuum, in this paper, we propose Continuum, a framework for automated infrastructure deployment and benchmarking that helps researchers and engineers to deploy and test their use cases in a few lines of code. Continuum can automatically deploy a wide variety of emulated infrastructures and networks locally and in the cloud, install software for operating services and resource managers, and deploy and benchmark applications for users with diverse configuration options. In our evaluation, we show how our design covers these requirements, allowing Continuum to be (i) highly flexible, supporting any computing model, (ii) highly configurable, allowing users to alter framework components using an intuitive API, and (iii) highly extendable, allowing users to add support for more infrastructure, applications, and more. Continuum is available at https://github.com/atlarge-research/continuum.