Agentic Placement of Microservices on the Computing Continuum

Publication Date: 4/19/2026

Event: The Seventeenth International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization (Cloud Computing 2026) – special Track (Hyper-CC)

Reference: pp. 13-18, 2026

Authors: Kunal Rao, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Giuseppe Coviello, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Srimat T. Chakradhar, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.

Abstract: Deploying microservices across the computing continuum (edge cloud) requires placement decisions that adapt to workload variation and heterogeneous infrastructure, yet existing solutions often rely on static policies or opaque heuristics. We present Bellona a system for reliable and auditable Large Language Model (LLM)-driven workflow execution that combines a declarative specification language with a runtime that orchestrates tool calls, conditional control flow, and structured LLM reasoning. Using Bellona, we implement an agentic placement workflow that automatically recommends edge or cloud execution. The workflow uses structured prompts and verifiable tool interactions to (i) parse placement and latency-report instructions, (ii) update the latency log, and (iii) select placements based on measured latency improvement thresholds. We evaluate the resulting agent on two representative microservices-based video analytics applications (human-attributes detection and face recognition) over two days of varying workload. Across 1,440 placement decisions per service, the agent achieves accuracies of 94.66%/84.94% (human-attributes detection, Day1/Day2) and 80.91%/96.53% (face recognition, Day1/Day2) with GPT-4o; with GPT-5, accuracy increases to 98.82%/99.45% (human-attributes detection) and 99.31%/99.8% (face recognition). These results demonstrate that Bellona can support practical, self-improving agentic control for placement of microservices on the computing continuum.

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