Presentation

The Cross-stack Adaptation for the Edgification of Microservices Applications research project, also called RAINDROP, started in September 2022.
It brings together three complementary teams from University of Namur (UNamur) and University of Louvain (UCLouvain) to address in a unique way the challenge of building, deploying, and operating applications on upcoming cloud infrastructures formed of a continuum of core (data centers) and edge resources. Particularly, it leverages a unique collaboration between software and data engineering, cloud platforms and runtimes, and infrastructure management.
It allows application designers to build and gradually adapt microservices applications from a cloud (data center) target towards novel distributed cloud infrastructures such as the edge-cloud continuum and multi-site (micro-cloud) environments. It targets the demanding class of collaborative and latency-sensitive applications for which the use of edge resources close to users should allow interactions and collaborations with greatly reduced latencies and increased responsiveness, enabling new classes of usages such as collaborative work in near-real-time, virtual spaces, or smart environments. At the heart of the project lies the synergy between three complementary forms of adaptation: - for applications deployment, placement, and configuration during their execution, - for the support infrastructure under dynamic demand and availability of resources, - and through the necessary software evolution to make applications increasingly able to benefit from such automated runtime deployments over the edge-core continuum.
The interoperation between these different classes of adaptations leverages common application and infrastructure models, and enable a feedback loop between runtime observations and developers enacting software evolution. RAINDROP leverages best practices in cloud application development and operation, and intend to significantly improve programmability and abstraction for cloud developers wishing to take advantage of the promising, but demanding and complex novel core-edge infrastructures.
The overall vision of RAINDROP is illustrated by the figure below.