This PhD proposal will develop a container orchestration scheme for real-time applications, deployed on a continuum of heterogeneous computing resources in the embedded-edge-cloud space, with a specific focus on applications that require real-time guarantees. Applications, from autonomous vehicles, environment monitoring, or industrial automation, applications traditionally require high predictability with real-time guarantees, but they increasingly ask for more runtime flexibility as well as a minimization of their overall environmental footprint. For these applications, a novel adaptive runtime strategy is required that can optimize dynamically at runtime the deployment of software payloads on hardware nodes, with a mixed-critical objective that combines real-time guarantees with the minimization of the environmental footprint.