Self-managing cloud-native applications: Design, implementation, and experience

Abstract

Running applications in the cloud efficiently requires much more than deploying software in virtual machines. Cloud applications have to be continuously managed : 1) to adjust their resources to the incoming load and 2) to face transient failures replicating and restarting components to provide resiliency on unreliable infrastructure. Continuous management monitors application and infrastructural metrics to provide automated and responsive reactions to failures (health management) and changing environmental conditions (auto-scaling) minimizing human intervention.In the current practice, management functionalities are provided as infrastructural or third party services. In both cases they are external to the application deployment. We claim that this approach has intrinsic limits, namely that separating management functionalities from the application prevents them from naturally scaling with the application and requires additional management code and human intervention. Moreover, using infrastructure provider services for management functionalities results in vendor lock-in effectively preventing cloud applications to adapt and run on the most effective cloud for the job.In this paper we discuss the main characteristics of cloud native applications, propose a novel architecture that enables scalable and resilient selfmanaging applications in the cloud, and relate on our experience in porting a legacy application to the cloud applying cloud-native principles.

Systematic Literature Review of the Cloud-ready Software Architecture

“…Similar research questions were found in works created by Sodhi et al (2011), Toffetti et al (2016), Kratzke and Quint (2017). However, they address different aspects of cloud-ready software development.…”

“…Here are just few examples of our findings. Andrikopoulos et al (2012), Toffetti et al (2016), Wilder (2012), Kratzke and Peinl (2016), Kratzke and Quint (2017) are using "cloud-native" term in their works and each of them provides a definition for it. "Cloud-ready" is mentioned by Brown and Capern (2014) from IBM, Kavis (2014), andWeinman (2016).…”

“…He also defines Cloudenabled software as software that was specifically adopted to be suitable for the cloud (Andrikopoulos et al (2013)). Toffetti et al (2016) in their work make this definition even more universal: "Cloudnative application . .…”

“…Definitions provided in Andrikopoulos et al (2012), Toffetti et al (2016) and (2012) are more universal and technology agnostic. Authors of (Leymann et al (2016)) argues, that term "cloud-native" should be applicable to applications developed using containers or microservices.…”

“…They evaluate how application properties like security, portability, scalability and similar are affected by a choice of each of these approaches. Toffetti et al (2016) work is more concentrated on cloud-native application development than on research questions raised in this study. Kratzke and Quint (2017) released an article where they exam an origin and meaning of "cloud-native application" (CNA) term together with CNA properties and engineering traits.…”