Intent-Driven Distributed Applications Management Over Compute and Network Resources in the Computing Continuum

Abstract

Intent-driven orchestration enables organizations to achieve greater automation, integration, and intelligence of their compute and network resources by defining their objectives and policies in a more abstract and holistic way, and letting the orchestration system handle the coordination, optimization, and adaptation of the resources in response to changing needs and conditions. The trend for the development of intent-driven orchestration mechanisms has been growing in recent years as the deployment of distributed applications in the computing continuum has become more complex and diverse. In this manuscript we detail a novel approach for the management of distributed applications in the computing continuum. An hierarchical decision making scheme is proposed where an entity in a specific level of the hierarchy has the responsibility for management of the overall application or a part of it, without having the control of all the management actions. The control is distributed across various entities that have to collaborate towards some joint objectives. Both compute and network resources management is considered that can be provided by the same or different infrastructure providers.

Intent-driven orchestration of serverless applications in the computing continuum

“…In the current manuscript, we adopt principles and specifications provided in the aforementioned research works; each one having a limited scope and specific focus as detailed before and compared in Table 1, and provide an intent specification that requires to have a broader scope and applicability to address deployments across the computing continuum. Towards this direction, we consider specifications for intent-driven resources management in the continuum in our previous work [8]. Based on this work, we consider the description of intent in the form of objectives, properties and constraints that can be defined at node (function or microservice), link or application level.…”

“…Therefore, utilizing P r e p r i n t intent-driven approaches along with necessary abstractions to declare various requirements bridges the interaction gap between application developers, application providers, and infrastructure providers [7]. Application developers can design their applications considering the ability to declare deployment preferences, requirements, and constraints [4,8], application providers can define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) in accordance with the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that they may have with their clients, while infrastructure providers can facilitate these SLOs and optimally serve the provision of the applications.…”