High Availability Management for Applications Services in the Cloud Container-Based Platform

Abstract

Cloud is a popular and attractive paradigm for providing online computing services to the end users. Recently many of the users move their business applications to the cloud and become tenants for the cloud service providers. Some tenants expect their applications that are provided as services to be highly available (HA) at any time. Managing HA of applications services in the cloud is a big challenge due to the dynamic nature and the huge number of the provision services in the cloud. Limited number of solutions address the HA of services in the cloud platforms that use containers instead of Virtual Machines (VMs). In addition, HA measurements are still missing by the proposed solutions in the literature. Therefore, in this article we propose a framework to incorporate the HA feature for the applications that are deployed in cloud platforms that use the containers. The framework depends on the novel idea of integrating HA middlewares OpenSAF and Pacemaker with the containers to manage HA of the applications services. As a proof of concept, we build a prototype for our framework using our private cloud Container-based platform. For the evaluation purposes, we compare the same framework using our cloud VM-based platform. The measurements show the ability of the proposed framework to manage HA of different services using the containers with faster service recovery time and shorter service outage time than using the VMs.