DACCA: Distributed Adaptive Cloud Continuum Architecture

Recently, the need for unified orchestration frameworks that can manage extremely heterogeneous, distributed, and resource-constrained environments has emerged due to the rapid development of cloud, edge, and IoT computing. Kubernetes and other traditional cloud-native orchestration systems are not built to facilitate autonomous, decentralized decision-making across the computing continuum or to seamlessly integrate non-container-native devices. This paper presents the Distributed Adaptive Cloud Continuum Architecture (DACCA), a Kubernetes-native architecture that extends orchestration beyond the data center to encompass edge and Internet of Things infrastructures. Decentralized self-awareness and swarm formation are supported for adaptive and resilient operation, a resource and application abstraction layer is established for uniform resource representation, and a Distributed and Adaptive Resource Optimization (DARO) framework based on multi-agent reinforcement learning is integrated for intelligent scheduling in the proposed architecture. Verifiable identity, access control, and tamper-proof data exchange across heterogeneous domains are further ensured by a zero-trust security framework based on distributed ledger technology. When combined, these elements enable increasingly autonomous workload orchestration, trading centralized control for adaptive, decentralized operation with enhanced interoperability, scalability, and trust. Thus, the proposed architecture enables self-managing and context-aware orchestration systems that support next-generation AI-driven distributed applications across the entire computing continuum.