Aether2 introduces provider-agnostic resource management

Aether2 has been introduced as a distributed, provider-agnostic resource management system designed for the Computing Continuum, which includes cloud data centers, edge platforms, and IoT devices.

Unlike existing approaches that tightly couple application descriptions to specific platforms like Kubernetes or individual cloud providers, Aether2 utilizes a formal Virtual Architecture (VA) model. This model represents applications as directed graphs of abstract resources and connectivity constraints, allowing for optimized assignments without requiring providers to reveal their full internal states.

The system employs a lightweight leader-follower protocol and a VAMonitor component to perform runtime monitoring. This enables the detection of violations in latency, bandwidth, or resource constraints, triggering re-evaluations when conditions change. Scalability experiments involving hundreds of resources and thousands of connection constraints demonstrated near-linear performance.