Knowledge representation of the state of a cloud-native application

Abstract

Cloud Computing has revolutionized the way applications are developed, deployed, and maintained. Over the past decade, we have observed dynamically growing interest in Cloud Computing. The benefits of the cloud approach caused the increasing popularity of Cloud-native applications. Cloud-native is an approach to developing and deploying applications according to the concepts of DevOps, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), containers and microservices. The knowledge about Cloud Computing has become extensive and complex. Fortunately, before Cloud-native applications development, there was a great deal of effort to develop tools for effective knowledge representation. Ontologies are a convenient way to show the relations between domain-specific concepts. In this paper, we propose an ontology named CNOnt that describes the state-of-the-art of Cloud-native applications. CNOnt covers aspects from the clusterization perspective. First, this paper presents the engineering perspective of building the CNOnt ontology. Second, we demonstrate a use case of our ontology that proves the correctness of CNOnt development. This ontology is exhausted in CNOnt Broker. It is a system that applies the information in the OWL file into the Kubernetes cluster and in reverse. The knowledge representation makes Cloud-native applications understandable to third-party systems and increases interoperability between different microservices.