Cloudifying Desktop Applications: Your Laptop is your Data Center

In the last decades the ICT world has undergone profound transformations, influencing and being influenced by the socioeconomic paradigm shift from a ownership-centered model to a sharing-oriented one, where the property of product is no longer important and what matters is the access to the service it provides. What proved to be a real game changer was the transition from physical to virtual servers with the affirmation of virtualization at first and then with the introduction of containerization and container orchestrators, among which the Kubernetes project is becoming a standard platform for developers and operators. Released by Google in 2015, this open-source system provides a robust platform to automate the deployment and scaling of containerized applications in a clustered environment. Nowadays, therefore, it is a common practice to embrace the cloud computing model: on-demand consuming digital services offloaded somewhere, aiming to achieve the maximum flexibility and a significant cost reduction with respect of a proprietary data center. The progress made in this field, however, have always had a focus on professional users and enterprises, while affecting just indirectly the target of common desktop users where the lack of technical backgrounds and a limited need of virtualization usually led them to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, by consuming out-of-the-box digital services which provide simple and friendly interfaces. In the last years, the success of the IoT world, the massive spread of smart devices and a bigger pervasiveness of IT in everyday life have opened a different scenario, where everyone is surrounded by lots of digital devices, often small and always on, each one just performing few tasks. This moved the project in which this thesis is involved to explore the potential of Liquid computing, a distributed computing paradigm which aims to provide to the final user a unified virtual environment across devices where applications and data flow seamlessly. This work proposes a desktop application which helps even non professional users to easily leverage computational power and storage provided by their own devices or offered by an organization (e.g. corporate, university) to run even heavy applications, thus becoming the managers of their own "data center".