Coupling Orchestration and DNS for Seamless Service Migration in the Edge–Cloud Continuum

Modern distributed applications increasingly span an edge-cloud continuum, where services may need to dynamically migrate between far-edge, near-edge, and cloud environments to meet latency, resource, or policy constraints. Ensuring seamless service continuity during such migrations remains a significant challenge, particularly due to delays in DNS resolution and inconsistent client routing. This paper presents a modular DNS-driven orchestration framework designed for Kubernetes-based infrastructures. Our approach integrates service orchestration logic with a shared DNS component to enable fast and autonomous service redirection without relying on public DNS providers or complex service meshes. By coupling orchestrator-triggered migrations with DNS record updates, the system ensures immediate service reachability after migration. An optional analytics and decision engine complements the framework by triggering orchestrator actions based on monitoring insights. We evaluate the DNS reconfiguration performance of our solution compared to traditional ExternalDNS-based architectures, demonstrating significantly lower propagation latency and higher determinism during service migrations across the edge–cloud continuum.