Failure-Resilient and Carbon-Efficient Deployment of Microservices over the Cloud-Edge Continuum

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of deploying microservice-based applications over a heterogeneous Cloud-Edge continuum while balancing failure resilience, performance, and environmental sustainability. It introduces the FREEDA toolchain, a constraint-based system that combines Failure Enhancer, Energy Enhancer, and Harmonizer with a Multi-Criteria Solver to autonomously reconfigure deployments through migrations, flavour changes, and workload rebalancing, guided by historical data and carbon-aware policies. The approach is validated through extensive simulated and emulated experiments (including BrewMonitor and ECLYPSE-based scenarios), showing FREEDA can achieve robust service continuity with substantial carbon-emission reductions (often 21–52% in simulations, and 35% average in emulations) without compromising availability. This work contributes a holistic, explainable framework for adaptive MSA deployment across the Cloud-Edge continuum and demonstrates practical impact in reducing environmental footprint while maintaining QoS. The results highlight FREEDA’s potential to inform DevOps practices and motivate further development toward broader design-time and runtime environmental objectives.

Abstract

Deploying microservice-based applications (MSAs) on heterogeneous and dynamic Cloud-Edge infrastructures requires balancing conflicting objectives, such as failure resilience, performance, and environmental sustainability. In this article, we introduce the FREEDA toolchain, designed to automate the failure-resilient and carbon-efficient deployment of MSAs over the Cloud-Edge Continuum. The FREEDA toolchain continuously adapts deployment configurations to changing operational conditions, resource availability, and sustainability constraints, aiming to maintain the MSA quality and service continuity while reducing carbon emissions. We also introduce an experimental suite using diverse simulated and emulated scenarios to validate the effectiveness of the toolchain against real-world challenges, including resource exhaustion, node failures, and carbon intensity fluctuations. The results demonstrate FREEDA's capability to autonomously reconfigure deployments by migrating services, adjusting flavour selections, or rebalancing workloads, successfully achieving an optimal balance among resilience, efficiency, and environmental impact.

Figures (18)

• Figure 1: A bird's-eye view of FREEDA's toolchain
• Figure 2: Failure Enhancer Prolog clauses presented in FREEDA_Failure_Resilience2025
• Figure 3: Example of conflicting soft constraints generated by the Enhancers.
• Figure 4: Overview of the toolchain
• Figure 5: Overview of the application with flavours available for each component.