Autonomic orchestration of containers: Problem definition and research challenges

Today, a new technology is going to change the way cloud platforms are designed and managed. This technology is called container. A container is a software environment where to install an application or application component and all the library dependencies, the binaries, and a basic configuration needed to run the application. The container technology promises to solve many cloud application issues, for example the application portability problem and the virtual machine performance overhead problem. The cloud industry is adopting the container technology both for internal usage and as commercial offering. However, we are far away from the maturity stage and there are still many research challenges to be solved. One of them is container orchestration, that make it possible to define how to select, deploy, monitor, and dynamically control the configuration of multi-container packaged applications in the cloud. This paper presents the problem of autonomic container orchestration, analyze the state of the art solutions and discuss open challenges