  Containerized services deployed within various computing systems, such as
edge and cloud, desire live migration support to enable user mobility,
elasticity, and load balancing. To enable such a ubiquitous and efficient
service migration, a live migration solution needs to handle circumstances
where users have various authority levels (full control, limited control, or no
control) over the underlying computing systems. Supporting the live migration
at these levels serves as the cornerstone of interoperability, and can unlock
several use cases across various forms of distributed systems. As such, in this
study, we develop a ubiquitous migration solution (called UMS) that, for a
given containerized service, can automatically identify the feasible migration
approach, and then seamlessly perform the migration across autonomous computing
systems. UMS does not interfere with the way the orchestrator handles
containers and can coordinate the migration without the orchestrator
involvement. Moreover, UMS is orchestrator-agnostic, i.e., it can be plugged
into any underlying orchestrator platform. UMS is equipped with novel methods
that can coordinate and perform the live migration at the orchestrator,
container, and service levels. Experimental results show that for
single-process containers, the service-level approach, and for multi-process
containers with small (< 128 MiB) memory footprint, the container-level
migration approach lead to the lowest migration overhead and service downtime.
To demonstrate the potential of UMS in realizing interoperability and
multi-cloud scenarios, we examined it to perform live service migration across
heterogeneous orchestrators, and between Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
