About the complexity to transfer cloud applications at runtime and how container platforms can contribute?

Abstract

Cloud-native applications are often designed for only one specific cloud infrastructure or platform. The effort to port such kind of applications into a different cloud is usually a laborious one time exercise. Modern Cloud-native application architecture approaches make use of popular elastic container platforms (Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm). These kind of platforms contribute to a lot of existing cloud engineering requirements. This given, it astonishes that these kind of platforms (already existing and open source available) are not considered more consequently for multi-cloud solutions. These platforms provide inherent multi-cloud support but this is often overlooked. This paper presents a software prototype and shows how Kubernetes and Docker Swarm clusters could be successfully transfered at runtime across public cloud infrastructures of Google (Google Compute Engine), Microsoft (Azure) and Amazon (EC2) and further cloud infrastructures like OpenStack. Additionally, software engineering lessons learned are derived and some astonishing performance data of the mentioned cloud infrastructures is presented that could be used for further optimizations of IaaS transfers of Cloud-native applications.