Towards Scalable Federated Container Orchestration: The CODECO Approach

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.