Experimenting with Energy-Awareness in Edge-Cloud Containerized Application Orchestration

Abstract: This paper explores the role of energy-awareness strategies into the deployment of applications across heterogeneous Edge-Cloud infrastructures. It proposes methods to inject into existing scheduling approaches energy metrics at a computational and network level, to optimize resource allocation and reduce energy consumption. The proposed approach is experimentally evaluated using a real-world testbed based on ARM devices, comparing energy consumption and workload distribution against standard Kubernetes scheduling. Results demonstrate consistent improvements in energy efficiency, particularly under high-load scenarios, highlighting the potential of incorporating energy-awareness into orchestration processes for more sustainable cloud-native computing.