MiCADO – Towards a Microservice-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator

In order to satisfy end-user requirements, many scientific and commercial applications require access to dynamically adjustable infrastructure resources. Cloud computing has the potential to provide these dynamic capabilities. However, utilising these capabilities from application code is not trivial and requires application developers to understand low-level technical details of clouds. This paper investigates how a generic framework can be developed that supports the dynamic orchestration of cloud applications both at deployment and at run-time. The advantages and challenges of designing such framework based on microservices is analysed, and a generic framework, called MiCADO – (Microservices-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator) is proposed. A first prototype implementation of MiCADO to support data intensive commercial web applications is also presented

Towards Cloud Application Description Templates Supporting Quality of Service

Typical scientific, industrial and public sector applications require resource scalability and efficient resource utilization in order to serve a variable number of customers. Cloud computing provides an ideal solution to support such applications. However, the dynamic and intelligent utilization of cloud infrastructure resources from the perspective of cloud applications is not trivial. Although there have been several efforts to support the intelligent and coordinated deployment, and to a smaller extent also the run-time orchestration of cloud applications, no comprehensive solution has emerged until now that successfully leverages large scale near operational levels and ease of use. COLA is a European research project to provide a reference implementation of a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications. Such applications can then be embedded into workflows or science gateway frameworks to support complex application scenarios from user-friendly interfaces. A specific aspect of the cloud orchestration framework developed by COLA is the ability to describe complex application architectures incorporating several services. Besides the description of service components, the framework will also support the definition of various Quality of Service (QoS) parameters related to performance, economic viability and security. This paper concentrates on this latter aspect analysing how such application description templates can be developed based on existing standards and technologies

MiCADO -Microservice-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator

Various scientific and commercial applications require automated scalability and orchestration on cloud computing resources. However, extending applications with such automated scalability on an individual basis is not feasible. This paper investigates how such automated orchestration can be added to cloud applications without major reengineering of the application code. We suggest a generic architecture for an application level cloud orchestration framework, called MiCADO that supports various application scenarios on multiple heterogeneous federated clouds. Besides the generic architecture description, the paper also presents the first MiCADO reference implementation, and explains how the scalability of the Data Avenue service that is applied for data transfer in WS-PGRADE/gUSE based science gateways, can be improved. Performance evaluation of the implemented scalability based on up and downscaling experiments is presented