Recent trends in cloud computing go towards the development of new paradigms, e.g. heterogeneous, federated, distributed multi-clouds and clouds which interact with local and edge resources. The new paradigms alleviate the tight interactions between the computing and networking infrastructures, with the purpose of addressing the ever-increasing dynamic processing and storage requirements of data-intensive applications. The dynamicity of emerging data-intensive applications requires optimized use of cloud and edge resources with respect to cost, flexibility and scalability.
The PrEstoCloud project made substantial research contributions in the cloud computing and real-time data intensive applications domains, by providing a dynamic, distributed, self-adaptive and proactively configurable architecture for deploying highly dynamic, data-intensive applications. In particular, PrEstoCloud combines real-time Big Data, mobile processing and cloud computing research in an innovative way that facilitates flexible deployment of data-intensive applications and extension of the fog computing paradigm to the extreme edge of the network. The PrEstoCloud solution is driven by the micro services paradigm and has been structured across five different conceptual layers: i) Meta-management; ii) Control; iii) Cloud infrastructure; iv) Cloud/Edge communication and v) Devices, layers. The solution supports the flexible deployment of data-intensive applications on multi-cloud, fog and edge resources. The validation of PrEstoCloud in three pilots from the logistics, mobile journalism and security surveillance application domains proved that it can improve the average response time, is domain agnostic and can make optimized use of available resources. Thus, it demonstrated added-value for attracting early adopters, initializing the exploitation process by showing concrete examples and benefits.