Automated deployment and run-time management of microservices-based applications in cloud computing environments is relatively well studied with several mature solutions. However, managing such applications and tasks in the cloud-to-edge continuum is far from trivial, with no robust, production-level solutions currently available. This paper presents our first attempt to extend an application-level cloud orchestration framework called MiCADO to utilise edge and fog worker nodes. The paper illustrates how MiCADO-Edge can automatically deploy complex sets of interconnected microservices in such multi-layered cloud-to-edge environments. Additionally, it shows how monitoring information can be collected from such services and how complex, user- defined run-time management policies can be enforced on application components running at any layer of the architecture. The implemented solution is demonstrated and evaluated using two realistic case studies from the areas of video processing and secure healthcare data analysis.

As cloud adoption increases, so do the number of available cloud service providers.Moving complex applications between clouds can be beneficial-or other times necessary-but achieving this so-called cloud portability is rarely straightforward. This article presents the adoption of OASIS TOSCA, a standard in the declarative description of cloud applications, to encourage and facilitate cloud portability in MiCADO, an application-level multi-cloud orchestration and auto-scaling framework. The interface to MiCADO is an Application Description Template, which draws from the TOSCA specification to describe an application in MiCADO. The generic design of these templates is presented and their applicability for achieving portability between different container and cloud environments is analysed and evaluated. A proof-of-concept where MiCADO serves as the deployment and execution engine for a Science Gateway in Sleep Healthcare is then described. In this proof-of-concept, MiCADO facilitates the deployment of a complex healthcare application, which is then moved from one cloud service provider to another with only minimal changes to the template which originally described it. This TOSCA-based approach to templates in MiCADO encourages movement between clouds by making cloud portability more approachable.