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Edge application’s distributed nature presents significant challenges for developers in orchestrating and managing the multitenant applications. In this paper, we propose a practical edge cloud software framework for deploying multitenant distributed smart applications. Here we exploit commodity, a low cost embedded board to form distributed edge clusters. The cluster of geo-distributed and wireless edge nodes not only power multitenant IoT applications that are closer to the data source and the user, but also enable developers to remotely deploy and orchestrate application containers over the cloud. Specifically, we propose building a software platform to manage the distributed edge nodes along with support services to deploy and launch isolated and multitenant user applications through a lightweight container. In particular, we propose an architectural solution to improve the resilience of edge cloud services through peer collaborated service migration when the failures happen or when resources are overburdened. We focus on giving the developers a single point control of the infrastructure over the intermittent and lossy wide area networks (WANs) and enabling the remote deployment of multitenant applications. 

The rapid growth in technology and wide use of internet has increased smart applications such as intelligent transportation control system, and Internet of Things, which heavily rely on an efficient and reliable connectivity network. To overcome high bandwidth work load on the network, as well as minimize latency for real-time applications, the computation can be moved from the central cloud to a distributed edge cloud. The edge computing benefits various smart applications that uses distributed network for data analytics and services. Different from the existing cloud management solutions, edge computing needs to move cloud management services towards distributed heterogeneous edge nodes for multi-tenant user applications. However, existing cloud management services do not offer remote deployment of multi-tenant user applications on the cloud of edge nodes. In this paper, we propose a practical edge cloud software framework for deploying multi-tenant distributed smart applications. Having multiple distributed end nodes, auto discovery of all active end nodes is required for deploying multi-tenant user applications. However, existing cloud solutions require either private network or fixed IP address, which is not achievable for the distributed edge nodes. Most of the edge nodes connected through the public internet without fixed IP, and some of them even connect through IEEE 802.15 based sensor networks. We propose to build a software platform to manage the distributed edge nodes as well as support services to deploy and launch isolated, multi-tenant user applications through a lightweight container. We propose an architectural solution to remotely access edge cloud management services through intermittent internet connections. We open sourced our whole set of software solutions, and analyzed the major performance metrics of the edge cloud platform.