  Smart-city services are typically developed as closed systems within each
city's vertical, communicating and interacting with cloud services while
remaining isolated within each provider's domain. With the emergence of 5G
private domains and the introduction of new M2M services focusing on autonomous
systems, there is a shift from the cloud-based approach to a distributed edge
computing paradigm, in a \textit{continuum} orchestration. However, an
essential component is missing. Current orchestration tools, designed for
cloud-based deployments, lack robust workload isolation, fail to meet timing
constraints, and are not tailored to the resource-constrained nature of edge
devices. Therefore, new orchestration methods are needed to support MEC
environments. The work presented in this paper addresses this gap. Based on the
real needs of a smart-city testbed - the Aveiro Living Lab-, we developed a set
of orchestration components to facilitate the seamless orchestration of both
cloud and edge-based services, encompassing both critical and non-critical
services. This work extends the current Kubernetes orchestration platform to
include a novel location-specific resource definition, a custom scheduler to
accommodate real-time and legacy services, continuous service monitoring to
detect sub-optimal states, and a refined load balancing mechanism that
prioritizes the fastest response times.
