Paracloud: Bringing application insight into cloud operations

Abstract

Applications have commonly been oblivious to their cloud runtimes. This is primarily because they started their journey in IaaS clouds, running on a guestOS inside VMs. Then to increase performance, many guestOSes have been paravirtualized making them virtualization aware, so that they can bypass some of the virtualization layers, as in virtio. This approach still kept applications unmodified. Recently, we are witnessing a rapid adoption of containers due to their packaging benefits, high density, fast start-up and low overhead. Applications are increasingly being on-boarded to PaaS clouds in the form of application containers or appc, where they are run directly on a cloud substrate like Kubernetes or Docker Swarm. This shift in deployment practices present an opportunity to make applications aware of their cloud. In this paper, we present Paracloud framework for application containers and discuss the Paracloud interface (PaCI) for three cloud operations namely migration, auto-scaling and load-balancing.