Deployment Management and Topology Discovery of Microservice Applications in the Multicloud Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing enables the evolution of modern software application design. Applications based on microservice architecture are an example. Meanwhile, multiclouds are widely accepted by enterprise as an infrastructure strategy; however, challenges remain. The autonomous and distributable nature of modern applications, as well as the complexity of multicloud infrastructure, often make universal application deployment management impractical. This phenomenon may further hinder application quality and efficiency. Therefore, deployment resource control and topology discovery in the multicloud infrastructure environment is an intriguing area of cloud computing research. This paper proposes a framework to manage application deployment in the multicloud environment. The framework uses a policy-based deployment control to automatically select and provide deployment resources from the multicloud infrastructure, and it subsequently uses topology discovery to visualize and verify the actual deployment. The proposed framework design is introduced in the paper, and a proof-of-concept prototype is implemented. Experiments in empirical scenarios are conducted. The experimental results indicate that the proposed framework is effective in controlling deployment resources and presenting actual deployment across clouds.