Project:
Transfer cloud-native applications at runtime
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.
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.
Software prototypes
Presentations