Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ACCORDION (Adaptive edge/cloud compute and network continuum over a heterogeneous sparse edge infrastructure to support nextgen applications)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-07-01 al 2023-04-30
ACCORDION establishes an opportunistic approach in bringing together edge resources/infrastructures (public clouds, on-premise infrastructures, telco resources, even end-devices) in pools defined in terms of latency, that can support NextGen application requirements. To mitigate the expectation that these pools will be “sparse”, providing low availability guarantees, ACCORDION will intelligently orchestrate the compute & network continuum formed between edge and public clouds, using the latter as a capacitor. Deployment decisions will also be taken based on privacy, security, cost, time, and resource type criteria. The slow adoption rate of novel technological concepts from the EU SMEs will be tackled through an application framework, that will leverage DevOps and SecOps to facilitate the transition to the ACCORDION system. With a strong emphasis on European edge computing efforts and three highly anticipated NextGen applications on collaborative VR, multiplayer mobile-gaming and intelligent content delivery, brought by the involved end-users, ACCORDION is expecting to impact the application development and deployment landscape radically, also directing part of the related revenue from non-EU vendors to EU-local infrastructure and application provide
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.
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.
ACCORDION is working to advance the state of the art in different contexts, ranging from advanced approaches for resource management to application structuring, from QoE assessment to latency-based tuning of applications, from AI-based application orchestration to in-network intelligence. The project already achieved some of these results, which have been published in conferences and journals.
Current and envisioned findings of ACCORDION are expected to have an impact in different fields, including but not limited to (i) Contribute to the development of an ecosystem for the future digitisation needs of industry and the public sector, (ii) Assist the development of new cloud-based services and infrastructures in Europe and foster an industrial capability in the cloud computing sector, (iii) Create new opportunities to encourage European-based providers to develop and offer cloud-based services based on the most advanced technologies, (iv) Leverage research and innovation projects to support the development and deployment of innovative cloud-based services, for the public and private sectors, (v) sets the ground on the emerging market of VR/AR technologies as the market has the potential to further evolve through the exploitation of IaaS and FaaS paradigm of ACCORDION (vi) Aim to remove the barrier of computer hardware and bundle offerings for a QoE-aware click-n-go play.
Current and envisioned findings of ACCORDION are expected to have an impact in different fields, including but not limited to (i) Contribute to the development of an ecosystem for the future digitisation needs of industry and the public sector, (ii) Assist the development of new cloud-based services and infrastructures in Europe and foster an industrial capability in the cloud computing sector, (iii) Create new opportunities to encourage European-based providers to develop and offer cloud-based services based on the most advanced technologies, (iv) Leverage research and innovation projects to support the development and deployment of innovative cloud-based services, for the public and private sectors, (v) sets the ground on the emerging market of VR/AR technologies as the market has the potential to further evolve through the exploitation of IaaS and FaaS paradigm of ACCORDION (vi) Aim to remove the barrier of computer hardware and bundle offerings for a QoE-aware click-n-go play.