Experimental evaluation of the cloud-native application design

Cloud-Native Applications (CNA) are designed to run on top of cloud computing infrastructure services with inherent support for self-management, scalability and resilience across clustered units of application logic. Their systematic design is promising especially for recent hybrid virtual machine and container environments for which no dominant application development model exists. In this paper, we present a case study on a business application running as CNA and demonstrate the advantages of the design experimentally. We also present Dynamite, an application auto-scaler designed for containerised CNA. Our experiments on a Vagrant host, on a private OpenStack installation and on a public Amazon EC2 testbed show that CNA require little additional engineering

Cloud-native databases : an application perspective

As cloud computing technologies evolve to better support hosted software applications, software development businesses are faced with a multitude of options to migrate to the cloud. A key concern is the management of data. Research on cloud-native applications has guided the construction of highly elastically scalable and resilient stateless applications, while there is no corresponding concept for cloud-native databases yet. In particular, it is not clear what the trade-offs between using self-managed database services as part of the application and provider-managed database services are. We contribute an overview about the available options, a testbed to compare the options in a systematic way, and an analysis of selected benchmark results produced during the cloud migration of a commercial document management application

Analysis and comparison of SOAP web services and gRPC protocol in microservice environment

Development of cloud services allowed us to speed up software development and make installing of software on platforms easier, but due to the characteristics of the distributed systems, this approach brought new challenges in the field of web service protocols, mostly intercommunication, monitoring and microservice operation management. In this master thesis we researched the field of microservices, the properties of distributed systems and web service protocols in relation to cloud-native applications. We studied the connection between speed, efficiency and suitability for the main protocols used by microservices. Since some of the protocols do not have complete support in frameworks that allow production of microservices, we defined the procedure to integrate new functionality and protocol support through the integration of program libraries. At the time of writing this thesis, we find that there are no major differences in principles of protocol description languages, despite the fact there are major differences in terms of effectiveness and functionalities. We assess that there are many downsides in the SOAP protocol, so we propose improvements by way of utilizing effective operations

Analysis and comparison of SOAP web services and gRPC protocol in microservice environment

Development of cloud services allowed us to speed up software development and make installing of software on platforms easier, but due to the characteristics of the distributed systems, this approach brought new challenges in the field of web service protocols, mostly intercommunication, monitoring and microservice operation management. In this master thesis we researched the field of microservices, the properties of distributed systems and web service protocols in relation to cloud-native applications. We studied the connection between speed, efficiency and suitability for the main protocols used by microservices. Since some of the protocols do not have complete support in frameworks that allow production of microservices, we defined the procedure to integrate new functionality and protocol support through the integration of program libraries. At the time of writing this thesis, we find that there are no major differences in principles of protocol description languages, despite the fact there are major differences in terms of effectiveness and functionalities. We assess that there are many downsides in the SOAP protocol, so we propose improvements by way of utilizing effective operations

Application Driven MOdels for Resource Management in Cloud Environments

El despliegue y la ejecución de aplicaciones de gran escala en sistemas distribuidos con unos parametros de Calidad de Servicio adecuados necesita gestionar de manera eficiente los recursos computacionales. Para desacoplar los requirimientos funcionales y los no funcionales (u operacionales) de dichas aplicaciones, se puede distinguir dos niveles de abstracción: i) el nivel funcional, que contempla aquellos requerimientos relacionados con funcionalidades de la aplicación; y ii) el nivel operacional, que depende del sistema distribuido donde se despliegue y garantizará aquellos parámetros relacionados con la Calidad del Servicio, disponibilidad, tolerancia a fallos y coste económico, entre otros. De entre las diferentes alternativas del nivel operacional, en la presente tesis se contempla un entorno cloud basado en la virtualización de contenedores, como puede ofrecer Kubernetes.El uso de modelos para el diseño de aplicaciones en ambos niveles permite garantizar que dichos requerimientos sean satisfechos. Según la complejidad del modelo que describa la aplicación, o el conocimiento que el nivel operacional tenga de ella, se diferencian tres tipos de aplicaciones: i) aplicaciones dirigidas por el modelo, como es el caso de la simulación de eventos discretos, donde el propio modelo, por ejemplo Redes de Petri de Alto Nivel, describen la aplicación; ii) aplicaciones dirigidas por los datos, como es el caso de la ejecución de analíticas sobre Data Stream; y iii) aplicaciones dirigidas por el sistema, donde el nivel operacional rige el despliegue al considerarlas como una caja negra.En la presente tesis doctoral, se propone el uso de un scheduler específico para cada tipo de aplicación y modelo, con ejemplos concretos, de manera que el cliente de la infraestructura pueda utilizar información del modelo descriptivo y del modelo operacional. Esta solución permite rellenar el hueco conceptual entre ambos niveles. De esta manera, se proponen diferentes métodos y técnicas para desplegar diferentes aplicaciones: una simulación de un sistema de Vehículos Eléctricos descrita a través de Redes de Petri; procesado de algoritmos sobre un grafo que llega siguiendo el paradigma Data Stream; y el propio sistema operacional como sujeto de estudio.En este último caso de estudio, se ha analizado cómo determinados parámetros del nivel operacional (por ejemplo, la agrupación de contenedores, o la compartición de recursos entre contenedores alojados en una misma máquina) tienen un impacto en las prestaciones. Para analizar dicho impacto, se propone un modelo formal de una infrastructura operacional concreta (Kubernetes). Por último, se propone una metodología para construir índices de interferencia para caracterizar aplicaciones y estimar la degradación de prestaciones incurrida cuando dos contenedores son desplegados y ejecutados juntos. Estos índices modelan cómo los recursos del nivel operacional son usados por las applicaciones. Esto supone que el nivel operacional maneja información cercana a la aplicación y le permite tomar mejores decisiones de despliegue y distribución.<br /