Real-Time Containers: A Survey

Container-based virtualization has gained a significant importance in a deployment of software applications in cloud-based environments. The technology fully relies on operating system features and does not require a virtualization layer (hypervisor) that introduces a performance degradation. Container-based virtualization allows to co-locate multiple isolated containers on a single computation node as well as to decompose an application into multiple containers distributed among several hosts (e.g., in fog computing layer). Such a technology seems very promising in other domains as well, e.g., in industrial automation, automotive, and aviation industry where mixed criticality containerized applications from various vendors can be co-located on shared resources. However, such industrial domains often require real-time behavior (i.e, a capability to meet predefined deadlines). These capabilities are not fully supported by the container-based virtualization yet. In this work, we provide a systematic literature survey study that summarizes the effort of the research community on bringing real-time properties in container-based virtualization. We categorize existing work into main research areas and identify possible immature points of the technology

Dynamic Model-based Management of Service-Oriented Infrastructure.

Models are an effective tool for systems and software design. They allow software architects to abstract from the non-relevant details. Those qualities are also useful for the technical management of networks, systems and software, such as those that compose service oriented architectures. Models can provide a set of well-defined abstractions over the distributed heterogeneous service infrastructure that enable its automated management. We propose to use the managed system as a source of dynamically generated runtime models, and decompose management processes into a composition of model transformations. We have created an autonomic service deployment and configuration architecture that obtains, analyzes, and transforms system models to apply the required actions, while being oblivious to the low-level details. An instrumentation layer automatically builds these models and interprets the planned management actions to the system. We illustrate these concepts with a distributed service update operation

Orchestrating Service Migration for Low Power MEC-Enabled IoT Devices

Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is a key enabling technology for Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks. MEC facilitates distributed cloud computing capabilities and information technology service environment for applications and services at the edges of mobile networks. This architectural modification serves to reduce congestion, latency, and improve the performance of such edge colocated applications and devices. In this paper, we demonstrate how reactive service migration can be orchestrated for low-power MEC-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Here, we use open-source Kubernetes as container orchestration system. Our demo is based on traditional client-server system from user equipment (UE) over Long Term Evolution (LTE) to the MEC server. As the use case scenario, we post-process live video received over web real-time communication (WebRTC). Next, we integrate orchestration by Kubernetes with S1 handovers, demonstrating MEC-based software defined network (SDN). Now, edge applications may reactively follow the UE within the radio access network (RAN), expediting low-latency. The collected data is used to analyze the benefits of the low-power MEC-enabled IoT device scheme, in which end-to-end (E2E) latency and power requirements of the UE are improved. We further discuss the challenges of implementing such schemes and future research directions therein

A Change Execution System for Enterprise Services with Compensation Support

Modern enterprises rely on a distributed IT infrastructure to execute their business processes, adopting Service Oriented Architectures in order to improve the flexibility and ease of adaptation of their functions. Nowadays this is a vital characteristic, as the increased competition forces companies to continuously evolve and adapt. SOA applications must be supported by management and deployment systems, which have to continuously apply modifications to the distributed infrastructure. This article presents a modelbased solution for automatically applying change plans to heterogeneous enterprise managed environments. The proposed solution uses models which describe in an abstract language the changes that need to be applied to the environment, and executes all the required operations to the specific managed elements. Also, to ensure that the environment ends in a stable state, compensation for previously executed operations is supported. The validation results from a case study taken from the banking domain are also presented here