After more than a decade of unprecedented growth of centralised cloud computing facilities, scalability and cost are the main drivers to shift data processing closer to the data path, including at the origin of data-producing devices. In large-scale sensing scenarios, including in smart cities and in billion-device telecommunications, concentrating all data processing purely in cloud-hosted software units is not feasible anymore.

Several concepts (edge computing, fog computing, near-memory/near-data computing) have emerged, each with their own community and with, thus far, fuzzy and overlapping terminology. In this project, we propose to investigate a first software framework for programmable continuums, based on recent gains in developer-friendly assisted application decomposition into microservices, to enable scalable and optimally distributed data processing applications. Withthis applied research approach, we aim at giving an answer to the currently open question: How do we engineer software for continuums?