Infrastructures for the Edge-Cloud Continuum on a Small Scale: a Practical Case Study

The Edge-Cloud Continuum (ECC) is an emerging paradigm for the holistic exploitation of all sorts of hardware resources. Compared with traditional cloud computing, ECC is more flexible, as it can operate with heterogeneous devices. ECC is thus particularly well-suited for implementing a compute infrastructure in contexts where hardware provisioning is not continuous, and where the need for resource sharing is high. This is the case, for instance, of research groups willing to share their computational resources, differing in terms of capabilities, maintenance, and provisioning. However, designing a small-scale ECC infrastructure is not trivial, as there are many admissible architectures, design choices, and technological solutions. In this paper, we report the experience of building a flexible architecture, involving both virtual and bare metal nodes, where researches can smoothly and occasionally (un)plug their own machines, and where computational tasks are dynamically balanced considering the currently available resources.