Resource Management in a Containerized Cloud: Status and Challenges

Abstract

Cloud computing heavily relies on virtualization, as with cloud computing virtual resources are typically leased to the consumer, for example as virtual machines. Efficient management of these virtual resources is of great importance, as it has a direct impact on both the scalability and the operational costs of the cloud environment. Recently, containers are gaining popularity as virtualization technology, due to the minimal overhead compared to traditional virtual machines and the offered portability. Traditional resource management strategies however are typically designed for the allocation and migration of virtual machines, so the question arises how these strategies can be adapted for the management of a containerized cloud. Apart from this, the cloud is also no longer limited to the centrally hosted data center infrastructure. New deployment models have gained maturity, such as fog and mobile edge computing, bringing the cloud closer to the end user. These models could also benefit from container technology, as the newly introduced devices often have limited hardware resources. In this survey, we provide an overview of the current state of the art regarding resource management within the broad sense of cloud computing, complementary to existing surveys in literature. We investigate how research is adapting to the recent evolutions within the cloud, being the adoption of container technology and the introduction of the fog computing conceptual model. Furthermore, we identify several challenges and possible opportunities for future research.

An Energy-Aware Combinatorial Virtual Machine Allocation and Placement Model for Green Cloud Computing

“…Finally, although designed for VMs, we consider that the ECO-VMAP model can also be used for allocating containers. Relatively recent container technology offers a lightweight alternative for virtual machines [58][59][60]. VMs are emulated by a hypervisor that runs on a physical server, i.e., host machine.…”

“…Therefore, containers are considered to be more vulnerable to possible attacks from malicious containers and prone to higher security risks [63,64]. Although these risks can be reduced to a degree by using additional security mechanisms, these mechanisms would bring additional overhead reducing the performance and elasticity of container platforms [58,63]. Another important issue yet to be solved within container technology is migration [65].…”

“…Thus, to migrate a number of containers to a destination host, the operating system of the host should support these libraries required by the containers. However, VMs can be migrated to a destination host as long as a compatible hypervisor exists in the host [58]. Thus, both VMs and containers have pros and cons, and although the container technology is promising, it is not dominant over the VM technology yet [67].…”

Self-organizing Fog Support Services for Responsive Edge Computing

“…A literature review by Maenhaut, Volckaert, Ongenae and De Turck [5] discusses challenges related to service orchestration, resource management and pricing in (distributed) clouds and the fog. An overview of the challenges in fog and edge computing is presented by Avasalcai, Murturi and Dustdar [6].…”

Container Placement and Migration in Edge Computing: Concept and Scheduling Models

“…Some research has been done in related fields, see for example the studies reported in [17][18][19][20], but these have not been in the context of containers. Others have reviewed the use of containers from a general perspective, without special emphasis on scheduling of containerized edge computing, see for example studies in [21,22]. Ahmad et al [23] report a survey of scheduling techniques in edge computing.…”