Nane Kratzke

Project:

Cloud TRANSIT

Transfer cloud-native applications at runtime

Published: 25 Jun 2014 (latest update: 09 Oct 2018)
Duration: 1st Nov. 2014 - 31th Mar. 2018
Report: Technical report (DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.22009.52321)
Funding: German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (13FH021PX4)
Partners: Lübeck University (Institute of Telematics), fat IT solutions GmbH (Kiel)

Research context

The project CloudTRANSIT dealt with the question of how to transfer cloud applications and services at runtime without downtime across cloud infrastructures from different public and private cloud service providers.

Especially European cloud service providers should track such kind of research because of the technical opportunities to bring cloud application workloads back home to Europe. Such workloads are currently often deployed and inherently bound to U.S. providers. Intensified EU General Data Protection (GDPR) policies, European Cloud Initiatives, or “America First” policies might even make this imperative.

So, technical solutions are needed for these scenarios that are manageable not only by large but also by small and medium-sized enterprises.

Research objectives

  • Analyzing public and private cloud infrastructures to determine commonalities that can be relied on to avoid vendor lock-in for cloud-native applications.
  • Investigation of solutions to realize transferable platform concepts for cloud-native applications.
  • Requirements engineering for a generic cloud service description language focusing cloud-native applications considering cloud services of typical complexity (distributed, load balanced, auto scaling).
  • Realizing a prototypic implementation of the cloud service description language.
  • Evaluating a proof-of-concept solution.

Research outcomes

The project systematically investigated practitioner initiated cloud application engineering trends of the last three years that provide several promising technical opportunities to avoid cloud vendor lock-in pragmatically. Commonalities of cloud infrastructures and cloud applications have been systematically analyzed.

In consequence, latest evolutions of cloud standards and cloud engineering trends (like containerization) were used to derive a cloud-native reference model (ClouNS) that guided the development of a pragmatic cloud-transferability solution. This solution intentionally separated the infrastructure-agnostic operation of elastic container platforms (like Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos/Marathon, etc.) via a multi-cloud-scaler and the platform-agnostic definition of cloud-native applications and services via an unified cloud application modeling language. Both components are independent but complementary. Because of their independence, they can even contribute (although not intended) to other fields like moving target based cloud security-but also distributed ledger technologies (block-chains) made provide options here.

The proof-of-concept solution realizes transferability for cloud applications and services at runtime without downtime.

Publications (chronological order)

  1. [TKV+2020] Truyen, Eddy and Kratzke, Nane and Van Landyut, Dimitri and Lagaisse, Bert and Joosen, Wouter. Managing Feature Compatibility in Kubernetes: Vendor Comparison and Analysis, in IEEE Access, 2020, DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3045768 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  2. [KS2020] Kratzke, Nane and Siegfried, Robert. Towards Cloud-native Simulations - Lessons learned from the front-line of cloud computing, in Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, 2020, DOI: 10.1177/1548512919895327 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  3. [TMK2019] Torkura, Kennedy A. and Meinel, Christoph and Kratzke, Nane. Dont́ Wait to be Breached! Creating Asymmetric Uncertainty of Cloud Applications via Moving Target Defenses, 2019 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  4. [KQ2018b] Kratzke, Nane and Quint, Peter-Christian. Technical Report of Project CloudTRANSIT - Transfer Cloud-native Applications at Runtime, Lübeck University of Applied Sciences, 2018, DOI: 10.2314/KXP:1678556971 , Technical report ResearchGate Bibtex
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  5. [Kra2018d] Kratzke, Nane. A Brief History of Cloud Application Architectures, in Applied Sciences, 2018, DOI: 10.3390/app8081368 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  7. [WK2018] Westerlund, Magnus and Kratzke, Nane. Towards Distributed Clouds - A review about the evolution of centralized cloud computing, distributed ledger technologies, and a foresight on unifying opportunities and security implications, in Proc. of the 16th Int. Conf. on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2018), 2018 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  8. [KQ2018a] Kratzke, Nane and Quint, Peter-Christian. Preliminary Technical Report of Project CloudTRANSIT - Transfer Cloud-native Applications at Runtime, Lübeck University of Applied Sciences, 2018, Preliminary technical report ResearchGate Bibtex
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  9. [Kra2018c] Kratzke, Nane. About the Complexity to Transfer Cloud Applications at Runtime and how Container Platforms can Contribute?, in Cloud Computing and Services Science (revised selected papers), Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS), Springer International Publishing, 2018, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-94959-8_2 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  10. [Kra2018b] Kratzke, Nane. About being the Tortoise or the Hare? A Position Paper on Making Cloud Applications too Fast and Furious for Attackers, in Proc. of the 8th Int. Conf. on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2018, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal), 2018 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  11. [QK2018a] Quint, Peter-Christian and Kratzke, Nane. Towards a Lightweight Multi-Cloud DSL for Elastic and Transferable Cloud-native Applications, in Proceedings of the 8th Int. Conf. on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2018, Madeira, Portugal), SciTePress, 2018, DOI: 10.5220/0006683804000408 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  12. [Kra2018a] Kratzke, Nane. About an Immune System Understanding for Cloud-native Applications - Biology Inspired Thoughts to Immunize the Cloud Forensic Trail, in Proc. of the 9th Int. Conf. on Cloud Computing, GRIDS, and Virtualization (CLOUD COMPUTING 2018, Barcelona, Spain), 2018, Best Paper Award ResearchGate Bibtex
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  13. [Stueben2017] Stüben, Christian. Autoscaling für elastische Container Plattformen, 2017 Bibtex
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  14. [QK2017] Quint, Peter-Christian and Kratzke, Nane. Towards a Description of Elastic Cloud-native Applications for Transferable Multi-Cloud-Deployments, in Proceedings of the 1st Int. Forum on Microservices (Microservices 2017, Odense, Denmark), 2017 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  16. [Kra2017a] Kratzke, Nane. Smuggling Multi-Cloud Support into Cloud-native Applications using Elastic Container Platforms, in Proceedings of the 7th Int. Conf. on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2017), 2017 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  17. [KQ2017a] Kratzke, Nane and Quint, Peter-Christian. Understanding Cloud-native Applications after 10 Years of Cloud Computing - A Systematic Mapping Study, in Journal of Systems and Software, Elsevier, 2017, DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2017.01.001 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  18. [KQ2016b] Kratzke, Nane and Quint, Peter-Christian. Investigation of Impacts on Network Performance in the Advance of a Microservice Design, in Cloud Computing and Services Science (revised selected papers), Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS), Springer, 2017 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  19. [QK2016b] Quint, Peter-Christian and Kratzke, Nane. Taming the Complexity of Elasticity, Scalability and Transferability in Cloud Computing - Cloud-Native Applications for SMEs, in International Journal on Advances in Networks and Services, International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA), 2016 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  20. [KQP+2016] Kratzke, Nane and Quint, Peter-Christian and Palme, Derek and Reimers, Dirk. Project Cloud TRANSIT - Or to Simplify Cloud-native Application Provisioning for SMEs by Integrating Already Available Container Technologies, in European Project Space on Smart Systems, Big Data, Future Internet - Towards Serving the Grand Societal Challenges, SCITEPRESS, 2016 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  21. [KP2016] Kratzke, N. and Peinl, R.. ClouNS - a Cloud-Native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects, in 2016 IEEE 20th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop (EDOCW), 2016, DOI: 10.1109/EDOCW.2016.7584353 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  23. [KQ2016a] Kratzke, Nane and Quint, Peter-Christian. ppbench - A Visualizing Network Benchmark for Microservices, in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2016), 2016, DOI: 10.5220/0005732202230231 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  24. [QK2016a] Quint, Peter-Christian and Kratzke, Nane. Overcome Vendor Lock-In by Integrating Already Available Container Technologies - Towards Transferability in Cloud Computing for SMEs, in Proceedings of CLOUD COMPUTING 2016 (7th. International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDS and Virtualization), 2016 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  25. [KQ2015a] Kratzke, Nane and Quint, Peter-Christian. How to Operate Container Clusters more Efficiently? Some Insights Concerning Containers, Software-Defined-Networks, and their sometimes Counterintuitive Impact on Network Performance, in International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA), 2015 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  26. [KQ2015] Kratzke, Nane and Quint, Peter-Christian. About Automatic Benchmarking of IaaS Cloud Service Providers for a World of Container Clusters, in Journal of Cloud Computing Research, Columbia International Publishing, 2015 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  27. [Kra2015b] Kratzke, Nane. About Microservices, Containers and their Underestimated Impact on Network Performance, in Proceedings of CLOUD COMPUTING 2015 (6th. International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDS and Virtualization), 2015 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  28. [Kra2014d] Kratzke, Nane. CloudTRANSIT - Sichere, plattformunabhängige und transferierbare IT-Services mittels einer generischen Cloud Service Description Language, in Impulse - Aus Forschung und Lehre der FH Lübeck, 2014 Bibtex
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  29. [Kra2014a] Kratzke, Nane. Lightweight Virtualization Cluster - Howto overcome Cloud Vendor Lock-in, in Journal of Computer and Communication (JCC), 2014, DOI: 10.4236/jcc.2014.212001 ResearchGate Bibtex
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  30. [Kra2014b] Kratzke, Nane. A Lightweight Virtualization Cluster Reference Architecture Derived from Open Source PaaS Platforms, in Open Journal of Mobile Computing and Cloud Computing (MCCC), 2014 ResearchGate Bibtex
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Software prototypes

  • UCAML: Universal Cloud Application Modeling Language
  • PLAIN: A tool to deploy, scale, and transfer elastic container platforms at runtime without downtime following the intended state model
  • ECP Deploy: A tool to deploy elastic container platforms pragmatically
  • easycompare: A tool to measure similarities of virtual machine types across different cloud service providers
  • ppbench: A benchmark for microservices
  • Open4SSH: A pragmatic SSH interface for remote automation scenarios for Ruby