Integrating IoT Devices in a Geographical Computing Infrastructure Orchestrated with Kubernetes

In the last two decades the cloud has gained a lot of importance, indeed the current trend is to engineer the new web applications to be cloud native, thus to be split up in loosely-coupled micro-services, each one containerized and deployed as a part of a bigger application. The use of containers allows to cut oneself off the hosting physical hardware and operating system, letting to focus on the main purposes of a web application: to be widespread and high-available. The cloud allows to achieve this goal, by gathering the infrastructure control under the cloud provider tenants and implementing the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) paradigms: the computational, networking and storage resources are provided on demand to the cloud provider's customers as if they were services. A technology that broke through the cloud market is Kubernetes, a project kicked off by Google in 2014 that allows to automate deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Beside the cloud, in recent years the edge computing has gained a lot of importance: it is a distributed computing paradigm that brings the computational and storage resources close to the final user, in order to improve the QoS standards in terms of latency and bandwidth. The goal of the project behind this thesis is to create a federation of Kubernetes clusters that cooperate at the edge of the network: many different tenants are connected together to cooperate in creating a federation of clusters with computational, storage and networking resources shared between them. In this scenario every tenant can make its own resource cluster available to the federation by sharing or leasing them out in a federated environment. This solution needs a way to make possible that the cluster that will form this federation can discover, authenticate and join them each other in a liquid and dynamic way. This work proposes a solution to allow clusters, both in Local Area Networks (as a set of IoT or edge devices) and in Wide Area Networks (as between data-centers or between IoT devices and the central cloud), to have an automatic discover and to peer each other in a transparent and secure way in a multi-tenant scenario.