NebulOuS: A Meta-Operating System with Cloud Continuum Brokerage Capabilities

Cloud Continuum is the paradigm that unifies and exploits resources from far edge to public and private cloud offerings, as well as processing nodes with significant capacity in between. Nowadays, the combination of all these resources for augmenting modern hyper-distributed applications becomes a necessity, especially considering the vast volumes of data, their velocity, and their variety, which constitute well known challenges of Big Data processing. In this paper, we address the main research question on how a Cloud Continuum management platform should be structured to cope with the constantly increasing challenges and opportunities of the domain. We introduce the NebulOuS architecture vision towards accomplishing substantial research contributions in the realms of Cloud Continuum brokerage. We propose an advanced architecture that enables secure and optimal application provisioning, as well as reconfiguration over the Cloud Continuum. NebulOuS introduces a novel Meta-Operating System and platform, that is currently being developed, for enabling transient Cloud Continuum brokerage ecosystems that seamlessly exploit edge and fog nodes, in conjunction with multi-cloud resources, to cope with the requirements posed by low latency applications.