Programming Paradigms for the Cloud Continuum

Abstract

The Cloud continuum is a notion for the distributed infrastructure able to run third party software on heterogeneous hardware ranging from the high performance core Cloud data centres, through smaller fog data centres, down to resource constrained Edge servers. Beyond that, one will often have Internet of Things (IoT) devices on a wired or wireless infrastructure for data collection and actuation. The application components should be allocated along this continuum in order to optimize the application performance which is a combined measure of communication speed and computational power. However, most applications are not written with distribution in mind, and may not even be component based. This paper discusses various programming paradigms and how they can be extended to support distribution and embedding into the microservice architecture supporting tomorrow’s Cloud applications.