The ACCORDION project's vision is to implement framework to manage next-gen applications deployment and runtime management on top of a diverse infrastructure composed of a federation of cloud and edge resources. In particular, ACCORDION's aim is to:
provide an open, low-latency, privacy-preserving, secure and robust virtualized infrastructure
provide an application management framework, tailored to the needs of the European SMEs skillset, that will enable the deployment of NextGen applications on top of this infrastructure, reaping the benefits of edge computing.
Following such vision, the ACCORDION Platform is composed of 3 distinct layers:
- Application Management Framework (AMF). This layer realizes the ACCORDION Portal, which is the main entry point for the developers. It allows them to submit their application components in the form of Docker images, VM images, or Unikernels. It also provides means to upload the application model, a description of the application components, their requirements in terms of resources, and their expected behavior in case of application- or resource-related events. The AMF also supports CI/CD (including DevSecOps) and includes a software component repository (Application Bucket).
- Continuum Management Framework (CMF). This layer transforms the events coming from the AMF and generated by internal components into actions that affect the application deployment in the underlying infrastructure (i.e. the Miniclouds). From an implementation perspective, the CMF follows the single-responsibility principle design. Practically, it is a collection of several loosely coupled services; each service is responsible for a single well-defined functionality. The Message Broker is the entry point of the CMF, and it receives, stores, and pushes messages from ACCORDION-internal and -external components. The Lifecycle Manager, Orchestrator, and Vim Gateway realize the orchestration pipeline, i.e. instruct the infrastructure to deploy and execute application components based on the application lifecycle management plan. The Application Status Registry, Minicloud Membership Management, and Resource Indexing & Discovery provide support information to the orchestration. The QoE Model and Proactive Resilience components implement the runtime adaptation as they monitor the application runtime and raise actionable events to the platform.
- Edge Minicloud. The infrastructure management layer. A Minicloud abstracts a set of underlying computational resources in geographical proximity and exposes those to the CMF. Practically, the Minicloud is realized as a software bundle that needs to be installed by the infrastructure owner to become part of the ACCORDION resource federation. Each Minicloud provides a unified interface for computing and network deployment and local orchestration (based on K3S), supporting VMs, Docker Images, and Unikernels. It also includes services for monitoring applications and resources and a resource discovery component that stores the status of the Minicloud's resources in a queryable distributed data structure. It also provides a storage component for persistent large volumes.
ACCORDION has been disseminated in many different media channels, and in prestigious scientific and technical venues. In terms of exploitation, ACCORDION achieved the transition from the ‘’Development phase’’ to the ‘’Pre-commercialisation/wrap-up phase’’ by developing, integrating, validating and delivering a TRL 5 cloud/edge platform and, at the same time, completing results-oriented dissemination and communication activities to stimulate stakeholder’s interest around ACCORDION technologies and assets. In regards to exploitation aspects and the introduction of the next phase, namely ‘’Commercialization / follow-u phase’’, the consortium identified viable exploitation pathways for the end-to-end cloud/edge ACCORDION platform and the identification of other Key Exploitable Assets that can be commercialized individually, and they cover specific market needs.
