  Serverless computing has emerged as an attractive paradigm due to the
efficiency of development and the ease of deployment without managing any
underlying infrastructure. Nevertheless, serverless computing approaches face
numerous challenges to unlock their full potential in hybrid environments. To
gain a deeper understanding and firsthand knowledge of serverless computing in
edge-cloud deployments, we review the current state of open-source serverless
platforms and compare them based on predefined requirements. We then design and
implement a serverless computing platform with a novel edge orchestration
technique that seamlessly deploys serverless functions across the edge and
cloud environments on top of the Knative serverless platform. Moreover, we
propose an offloading strategy for edge environments and four different
functions for experimentation and showcase the performance benefits of our
solution. Our results demonstrate that such an approach can efficiently utilize
both cloud and edge resources by dynamically offloading functions from the edge
to the cloud during high activity, while reducing the overall application
latency and increasing request throughput compared to an edge-only deployment.
