  It is becoming common practice to push interactive and location-based
services from remote datacenters to resource-constrained edge domains. This
trend creates new management challenges at the network edge, not least to
ensure resilience. These challenges now need to be investigated and overcome.
In this paper, we explore the use of open-source programmable asset
orchestration at edge cloud systems to guarantee operational resilience and a
satisfactory performance level despite system incidents such as faults,
congestion, or cyber-attacks. We discuss the design and deployment of a new
cross-level configurable solution, Resilient Edge Cloud Systems (RECS). Results
from appropriate tests made on RECS highlight the positive effects of deploying
novel service and resource management algorithms at both data and control
planes of the programmable edge system to mitigate against disruptive events
such as control channel issues, service overload, or link congestion. RECS
offers the following benefits: i) the switch automatically selects the
standalone operation mode after its disconnection from the upper-level
controllers; ii) deployment of edge virtualized services is made, according to
client requests; iii) the client requests are served by edge services and the
related traffic is balanced among the alternative on-demand routing paths to
the edge location where each service is available for its clients; iv) the TCP
traffic quality is protected from unfair competitiveness of UDP flows; and v) a
set of redundant controllers is orchestrated by a top-level multi-thread
cluster manager, using a novel management protocol with low overhead.
