TOSCA-Based and Federation-Aware Cloud Orchestration for Kubernetes Container Platform

• Main Authors: Dongmin Kim, Hanif Muhammad, Eunsam Kim, Sumi Helal, Choonhwa Lee
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-01-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: auto-scaling; cloud computing; Docker; cloud orchestration; cloud federation; TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications)
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/1/191

Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool for automatically installing and managing Docker containers, has recently begun to support a federation function of multiple Docker container clusters. This technology, called Kubernetes Federation, allows developers to increase the responsiveness and reliability of their applications by distributing and federating container clusters to multiple service areas of cloud service providers. However, it is still a daunting task to manually manage federated container clusters across all the service areas or to maintain the entire topology of cloud applications at a glance. This research work proposes a method to automatically form and monitor Kubernetes Federation, given application topology descriptions in TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), by extending the orchestration tool that automatizes the modeling and instantiation of cloud applications. It also demonstrates the successful federation of the clusters according to the TOSCA specifications and verifies the auto-scaling capability of the configured system through a scenario in which the servers of a sample application are deployed and federated.