Radon: a Programming Model and Platform for Computing Continuum Systems

Abstract: Emerging compute continuum environments pose new challenges that traditional cloud-centric architectures struggle to address. Latency, bandwidth constraints, and the heterogeneity of edge environments hinder the efficiency of centralized cloud solutions. While major cloud providers extend their platforms to the edge, these approaches often overlook its unique characteristics, limiting its potential. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Radon, a flexible programming model and platform designed for the edge-to-cloud continuum. Radon applications are structured as atoms, isolated stateful entities that communicate through messaging and can be composed into complex systems. The Radon runtime, based on WebAssembly (WASM), enables language- and deployment-independent execution, ensuring portability and adaptability across heterogeneous environments. This decoupling allows developers to focus on application logic while the runtime optimizes for diverse infrastructure conditions. We present a prototype implementation of Radon and evaluate its effectiveness through a distributed key-value store case study. We analyze the implementation in terms of code complexity and performance. Our results demonstrate that Radon facilitates the development and operation of scalable applications across the edge-to-cloud continuum advancing the current state-of-the-art.