Towards Scalable Federated Container Orchestration: The CODECO Approach

2026-01-19

AI Summary

This work proposes CODECO, a framework designed to address the challenges of traditional centralized Kubernetes in federated edge environments, where heterogeneous infrastructure, device mobility, and multi-provider collaboration are prevalent. CODECO enables edge autonomy while preserving global consistency through co-orchestration of data, computation, and networking. It integrates a semantic application model, a partitioned federation mechanism, AI-driven scheduling decisions, and a hybrid governance model. Built upon an extended Kubernetes architecture, CODECO supports context-aware microservice deployment and adaptive management. The framework’s efficacy in orchestrating applications across complex federated edge-cloud scenarios is validated through a reproducible experimental platform, demonstrating its capability to efficiently manage dynamic and heterogeneous edge environments.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Learning on the Edge & Model Compression
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Federated recommendation systems and personalization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

This paper presents CODECO, a federated orchestration framework for Kubernetes that addresses the limitations of cloud-centric deployment. CODECO adopts a data-compute-network co-orchestration approach to support heterogeneous infrastructures, mobility, and multi-provider operation. CODECO extends Kubernetes with semantic application models, partition-based federation, and AI-assisted decision support, enabling context-aware placement and adaptive management of applications and their micro-services across federated environments. A hybrid governance model combines centralized policy enforcement with decentralized execution and learning to preserve global coherence while supporting far Edge autonomy. The paper describes the architecture and core components of CODECO, outlines representative orchestration workflows, and introduces a software-based experimentation framework for reproducible evaluation in federated Edge-Cloud infrastructure environments.

Problem

• Federated Orchestration
• Kubernetes
• Edge-Cloud
• Heterogeneous Infrastructure
• Multi-provider Operation

Innovation

• federated orchestration
• semantic application model
• partition-based federation
• AI-assisted decision support
• hybrid governance