Component‐aware orchestration of cloud‐based enterprise applications, from TOSCA to Docker and Kubernetes

Abstract

Enterprise IT is currently facing the challenge of coordinating the management of complex, multicomponent applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms. Containers and container orchestrators provide a valuable solution to deploy multicomponent 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 multicomponent applications on top of existing container orchestrators, which enables managing each component independently from the container used to run it. We also present prototype tools that implement our approach, and we show how we effectively exploited them to carry out a concrete case study.

Analysing and Deploying (Micro)service-Based Applications

“…More precisely, the contents of Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 are taken verbatim from the publications [120], [29], [26], and [28], respectively. Chapter 6 is instead taken from an article recently submitted for publication [20]. Further information about each chapter is given below.…”

“…20. TOSCA-based representation of Sock Shop, obtained by exploting the TOSCA types defined by TosKer[31].…”

“…https://github.com/microservices-demo/microservices-demo/tree/master/deploy/dockercompose.19 https://github.com/di-unipi-socc/TosKeriser/tree/master/data/examples/sockshop-app 20. The management operations of a component have to be implemented by an associated artifact only when the component actually needs such operations[124].…”

Cluster-Agnostic Orchestration of Containerised Applications

“…In Sect. 6, the design and a prototype implementation of TORCH are presented. Section 7 shows preliminary results of some experiments run on a small-scale testbed.…”

Fine‐grained management of cloud‐native applications, based on TOSCA

“…As a result, Docker containers are currently only exploited as application containers, that is, for packaging a single application service, whose lifecycle management is entangled to that its container. 2 In this use case letter, we showcase how Docker containers can also be used as system containers, that is, for packaging multiple application services within the same container, without entangling their lifecycle management with that [Correction added on 10 September 2020, after first online publication: the layout of figures have been amended to fit in 6 pages.] F I G U R E 1 Service-aware application orchestration with Toskose of the container.…”