Intercloud Resource Discovery: A Future Perspective using Blockchain Technology

Intercloud is a single logical entity orchestrating resources from different individual clouds providing on-demand resource provisioning in a seamless manner. However, achieving efficient resource discovery in the intercloud environment remains a challenging task owing to the heterogeneity of resources and diversity of cloud platforms. The paper briefs about intercloud resource discovery, outlines the current work done using existing approaches and examines the challenges involved. Finally, the paper explains the concept of blockchain and presents an innovative conceptual model for efficient resource discovery in intercloud

Achieving Continuous Delivery of Immutable Containerized Microservices with Mesos/Marathon

In the recent years, DevOps methodologies have been introduced to extend the traditional agile principles which have brought up on us a paradigm shift in migrating applications towards a cloud-native architecture. Today, microservices, containers, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery have become critical to any organization’s transformation journey towards developing lean artifacts and dealing with the growing demand of pushing new features, iterating rapidly to keep the customers happy. Traditionally, applications have been packaged and delivered in virtual machines. But, with the adoption of microservices architectures, containerized applications are becoming the standard way to deploy services to production. Thanks to container orchestration tools like Marathon, containers can now be deployed and monitored at scale with ease. Microservices and Containers along with Container Orchestration tools disrupt and redefine DevOps, especially the delivery pipeline. This Master’s thesis project focuses on deploying highly scalable microservices packed as immutable containers onto a Mesos cluster using a container orchestrating framework called Marathon. This is achieved by implementing a CI/CD pipeline and bringing in to play some of the greatest and latest practices and tools like Docker, Terraform, Jenkins, Consul, Vault, Prometheus, etc. The thesis is aimed to showcase why we need to design systems around microservices architecture, packaging cloud-native applications into containers, service discovery and many other latest trends within the DevOps realm that contribute to the continuous delivery pipeline. At BetterDoctor Inc., it is observed that this project improved the avg. release cycle, increased team members’ productivity and collaboration, reduced infrastructure costs and deployment failure rates. With the CD pipeline in place along with container orchestration tools it has been observed that the organisation could achieve Hyperscale computing as and when business demands

MSL Framework: (Minimum Service Level Framework) for Cloud Providers and Users

Cloud Computing ensures parallel computing and emerged as an efficient technology to meet the challenges of rapid growth of data that we experienced in this internet age. Cloud computing is an emerging technology that offers subscription based services, and provide different models such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to cater the needs of different users groups. The technology has enormous benefits but there are serious concerns and challenges related to lack of uniform standards or nonexistence of minimum benchmark for level of services across the industry to provide an effective, uniform and reliable service to the cloud users. As the cloud computing is gaining popularity organizations and users are having problems to adopt the service due to lack of minimum service level framework which can act as a benchmark in the selection of the cloud provider and provide quality of services according to the users expectations. The situation becomes more critical due to distributed nature of the service...info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

State-preserving container orchestration in failover scenarios

Containers have been widely adopted for deployment of high availability applications and services. This adoption is in part due to the native support of fault tolerance mechanisms in container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes. While Kubernetes provides service replication as a fault tolerance mechanism for stateless applications, service replication does not satisfy requirements for stateful applications. Currently this shortcoming is addressed by data replication in databases. This requires a tight coupling and modification of the stateful application to support high availability. Thus, this thesis proposes a new Checkpoint/Restore (C/R) Kubernetes operator to achieve fault tolerance for stateful applications without any modification of the application. The operator takes a checkpoint in a configurable interval. In case of a fault a new application container is created automatically from the most recent checkpoint. We compare the proposed approach with a more conventional approach in which we pull and restore the application state from the application through an API. We measure the overhead of both methods, the service interruption and the recovery time in case of faults. We find the C/R Operator has similar performance in recovery time as the traditional approach, but does not need any application modification. The results signify C/R as a promising technology for a fault tolerance mechanism for stateful applications

Performance comparison of a SDN network between cloud-based and locally hosted SDN controllers

In a SDN network model, the robustness, scalability and reliability requirement of the control plane makes it an ideal candidate for being hosted on a cloud infrastructure. In addition, the control plane performs large volume of data processing from packet headers to network monitoring data in order to provide adequate level of QoS to the traffic. The realization of a cloud based SDN networking approach is predominantly dependent on the performance of the SDN controllers on the cloud environment. This paper presents a comparative study of the performance of a SDN network between a locally hosted SDN controller within the enterprise with a cloud based remote controller. Since a wide range of SDN controllers are available in the market with different levels of functionalities, performance and complexities, the analysis is validated by comparing the results across three different types of controllers. Furthermore, the impact of the network topology on the performance of the controllers is further validated by comparing the performance across two different topologies. In addition, a comparative performance analysis of the throughput and a theoretical evaluation of the controllers are also presented

Trends and directions in cloud service selection

With the growing popularity of cloud computing the number of cloud service providers and services have significantly increased. Thus selecting the best cloud services becomes a challenging task for prospective cloud users. The process of selecting cloud services involves various factors such as characteristics and models of cloud services, user requirements and knowledge, and service level agreement (SLA), to name a few. This paper investigates into the cloud service selection tools, techniques and models by taking into account the distinguishing characteristics of cloud services. It also reviews and analyses academic research as well as commercial tools in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses in the cloud services selection process. It proposes a framework in order to improve the cloud service selection by taking into account services capabilities, quality attributes, level of user's knowledge and service level agreements. The paper also envisions various directions for future research