Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach for Container-based Cloud Applications: The SWITCH and ENTICE Workbenches

Abstract

Many emerging smart applications rely on the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide solutions to time-critical problems. When building such applications, a software engineer must address multiple Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), including requirements for fast response time, low communication latency, high throughput, high energy efficiency, low operational cost and similar. Existing modern container-based software engineering approaches promise to improve the software lifecycle; however, they fail short of tools and mechanisms for NFRs management and optimisation. Our work addresses this problem with a new decision-making approach based on a Pareto Multi-Criteria optimisation. By using different instance configurations on various geo-locations, we demonstrate the suitability of our method, which narrows the search space to only optimal instances for the deployment of the containerised microservice.This solution is included in two advanced software engineering environments, the SWITCH workbench, which includes an Interactive Development Environment (IDE) and the ENTICE Virtual Machine and container images portal. The developed approach is particularly useful when building, deploying and orchestrating IoT applications across multiple computing tiers, from Edge-Cloudlet to Fog-Cloud data centres.

An Efficient Resource Scheduling Strategy for V2X Microservice Deployment in Edge Servers

“…Moreover, the container is a lightweight virtualization technology [8], whose engine layer provides resource scheduling and component isolation for microservices, as shown in Figure 2. Containers directly use hardware resources in the physical host, which can meet different platforms' requirements regarding development, test, and production environments [9]. However, the granularity of containers is smaller, and the number of physical machines that can be operated is higher, which means that resource management for containers is more complicated.…”