Enabling End-To-End Orchestration of Multi-Cloud Applications

The orchestration of application components across heterogeneous cloud providers is a problem that has been tackled using various approaches, some of which led to the creation of cloud orchestration and management standards, such as TOSCA and CAMP. Standardization is a definitive method of providing an end-To-end solution capable of defining, deploying, and managing applications and their components across heterogeneous cloud providers. TOSCA and CAMP, however, perform different functions with regard to cloud applications. TOSCA is focused primarily on topology modeling and orchestration, whereas CAMP is focused on deployment and management of applications. This paper presents a novel solution that not only involves the combination of the emerging standards TOSCA and CAMP, but also introduces extensions to CAMP to allow for multi-cloud application orchestration through the use of declarative policies. Extensions to the CAMP platform are also made, which brings the standards closer together to enable a seamless integration. Our proposal provides an end-To-end cloud orchestration solution that supports a cloud application modeling and deployment process, allowing a cloud application to span and be deployed over multiple clouds. The feasibility and the benefit of our approach are demonstrated in our validation study

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

MicroFog: A Framework for Scalable Placement of Microservices-based IoT Applications in Federated Fog Environments

MicroService Architecture (MSA) is gaining rapid popularity for developing large-scale IoT applications for deployment within distributed and resource-constrained Fog computing environments. As a cloud-native application architecture, the true power of microservices comes from their loosely coupled, independently deployable and scalable nature, enabling distributed placement and dynamic composition across federated Fog and Cloud clusters. Thus, it is necessary to develop novel microservice placement algorithms that utilise these microservice characteristics to improve the performance of the applications. However, existing Fog computing frameworks lack support for integrating such placement policies due to their shortcomings in multiple areas, including MSA application placement and deployment across multi-fog multi-cloud environments, dynamic microservice composition across multiple distributed clusters, scalability of the framework, support for deploying heterogeneous microservice applications, etc. To this end, we design and implement MicroFog, a Fog computing framework providing a scalable, easy-to-configure control engine that executes placement algorithms and deploys applications across federated Fog environments. Furthermore, MicroFog provides a sufficient abstraction over container orchestration and dynamic microservice composition. The framework is evaluated using multiple use cases. The results demonstrate that MicroFog is a scalable, extensible and easy-to-configure framework that can integrate and evaluate novel placement policies for deploying microservice-based applications within multi-fog multi-cloud environments. We integrate multiple microservice placement policies to demonstrate MicroFog's ability to support horizontally scaled placement, thus reducing the application service response time up to 54%

Component-aware Orchestration of Cloud-based Enterprise Applications, from TOSCA to Docker and Kubernetes

Enterprise IT is currently facing the challenge of coordinating the management of complex, multi-component applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms. Containers and container orchestrators provide a valuable solution to deploy multi-component applications over cloud platforms, by coupling the lifecycle of each application component to that of its hosting container. We hereby propose a solution for going beyond such a coupling, based on the OASIS standard TOSCA and on Docker. We indeed propose a novel approach for deploying multi-component applications on top of existing container orchestrators, which allows to manage each component independently from the container used to run it. We also present prototype tools implementing our approach, and we show how we effectively exploited them to carry out a concrete case study