Title: Container description ontology for CaaS

Authors: Khouloud Boukadi; Molka Rekik; Jorge Bernal Bernabe; Jaime Lloret

Addresses: MIRACL, Sfax University, Tunisia ' Department of Information Systems, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Al-Kharj, KSA; MIRACL, Sfax University, Tunisia ' Department of Information and Communications Engineering, University of Murcia, Spain ' Integrated Management Coastal Research Institute, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

Abstract: Besides its classical three service models (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), container as a service (CaaS) has gained significant acceptance. It offers without the difficulty of high-performance challenges of traditional hypervisors deployable applications. As the adoption of containers is increasingly wide spreading, the use of tools to manage them across the infrastructure becomes a vital necessity. In this paper, we propose a conceptualisation of a domain ontology for the container description called CDO. CDO presents, in a detailed and equal manner, the functional and non-functional capabilities of containers, Dockers and container orchestration systems. In addition, we provide a framework that aims at simplifying the container management not only for the users but also for the cloud providers. In fact, this framework serves to populate CDO, help the users to deploy their application on a container orchestration system, and enhance interoperability between the cloud providers by providing migration service for deploying applications among different host platforms. Finally, the CDO effectiveness is demonstrated relying on a real case study on the deployment of a micro-service application over a containerised environment under a set of functional and non-functional requirements.

Keywords: container as a service; CaaS; Docker; container orchestration system; ontology; container discovery.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2020.110944

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2020 Vol.16 No.4, pp.341 - 363

Received: 17 Sep 2019
Accepted: 22 Apr 2020
Published online: 02 Nov 2020 *

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