Lightweight Virtualization Cluster How to Overcome Cloud Vendor Lock-In

Abstract

To overcome vendor lock-in obstacles in public cloud computing, the capability to define transferable cloud-based services is crucial but has not yet been solved satisfactorily. This is especially true for small and medium sized enterprises being typically not able to operate a vast staff of cloud service and IT experts. Actual state of the art cloud service design does not systematically deal with how to define, deploy and operate cross-platform capable cloud services. This is mainly due to inherent complexity of the field and differences in details between a plenty of existing public and private cloud infrastructures. One way to handle this complexity is to restrict cloud service design to a common subset of commodity features provided by existing public and private cloud infrastructures. Nevertheless these restrictions raise new service design questions and have to be answered in ongoing research in a pragmatic manner regarding the limited IT-operation capabilities of small and medium sized enterprises. By simplifying and harmonizing the use of cloud infrastructures using lightweight virtualization approaches, the transfer of cloud deployments between a variety of cloud service providers will become possible. This article will discuss several aspects like high availability, secure communication, elastic service design, transferability of services and formal descriptions of service deployments which have to be addressed and are investigated by our ongoing research.

A Brief History of Cloud Application Architectures

“…Some standards like AMQP [11] for messaging (dating back almost to the pre-cloud era) exist. However, mainly these integrating and "gluing" service types-that are crucial for almost every cloud application on a higher cloud maturity level (see Table 1)-are often not provided in a standardized manner by cloud providers [12]. It seems that all public cloud service providers try to stimulate cloud customers to use their non-commodity convenience service "interpretations" to bind them to their infrastructures and higher-level service portfolios.…”

A Brief History of Cloud Application Architectures: From Deployment Monoliths via Microservices to Serverless Architectures and Possible Roads Ahead

“…Some standards like AMQP [11] for messaging (dating back almost to the pre-cloud era) exist. But especially these integrating and "glueing" service types -that are needed for almost every cloud application on a higher cloud maturity level (see Table 1) -are often not provided in a standardized manner by cloud providers [12]. It seems that all public cloud service providers try to stimulate cloud customers to use their non-commodity convenience service "interpretations" in order to bind them to their infrastructures and higher-level service portfolios.…”

ClouNS - a Cloud-Native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects

“…Services like load balancing, auto scaling or message queuing systems are needed to design an elastic and scalable cloud-native system on any cloud service infrastructure. But especially these services are not considered consequently by current cloud standards (see Table 2 and [17]). All cloud service providers try to stimulate cloud customers to use these non-commodity convenience services in order to bind them to their infrastructure.…”