The Pledger project aims at delivering a new architectural paradigm and a toolset that will pave the way for next generation edge computing infrastructures, tackling the modern challenges faced today and coupling the benefits of low latencies on the edge, with the robustness and resilience of cloud infrastructures. The project will deliver a set of tools and processes that will enable a) edge computing providers to enhance the stability and performance effectiveness of their edge infrastructures, through modelling the overheads and optimal groupings of concurrently running services, runtime analysis and adaptation, thus gaining a competitive advantage b) edge computing adopters to understand the computational nature of their applications, investigate abstracted and understandable QoS metrics, facilitate trust and smart contracting over their infrastructures and identify how they can balance their cost and performance to optimise their competitiveness and monitor their SLAs. By providing this toolset, the project will allow also third parties to act as independent validators of QoS features in IoT applications, enabling new decentralised applications and business models, thus filling a large gap in the emerging edge/IoT computing market landscape. The project validates its results through three use cases which are very relevant for the innovative edge/cloud computing concepts it plans to introduce: namely in manufacturing, mixed reality and smart cities application domains.