Federated Architecture for Serverless Platforms Aimed at Transparent Execution in the Edge-Cloud Continuum

The stateless nature of serverless computing makes it a viable choice for establishing the long-desired edge-cloud continuum. Current efforts to provide a unified view over both the cloud and the edge are vendor-centric, with proprietary interfaces. This makes interoperability between different infrastructures difficult, while also raising questions about future-proofing. To overcome this problem, we introduce a federation layer which provides a unified view over distinct edge-cloud solutions. We summarise the current open questions and define a set of functional requirements for a unifying federation layer. We identify the main pillars required for fulfilling the requirements from a technical perspective and discuss concrete implementation approaches. Finally, we also showcase a practical verification of the architecture, leveraging a federation of geographically distributed Kubernetes clusters. The verification is done using multiple serverless runtime options, with computing environments scattered both in the cloud and in the edge, overcoming various connectivity restrictions in place.