Containerization technologies: taxonomies,applications and challenges

Modern scientific research challenges require new technologies, integrated tools, reusable and complex experiments in distributed computing infrastructures. But above all, computing power for efficient data processing and analyzing. Containers technologies have emerged as a new paradigm to address such intensive scientific applications problems. Their easy deployment in a reasonable amount of time and the few required computational resource make them more suitable. Containers are considered light virtualization solutions. They enable performance isolation and flexible deployment of complex, parallel, and high-performance systems. Moreover, they gained popularity to modernize and migrate scientific applications in computing infrastructure management. Additionally, they reduce computational time processing. In this paper, we first give an overview of virtualization and containerization technologies. We discuss the taxonomies of containerization technologies of the literature, and then we provide a new one that covers and completes those proposed in the literature. We identify the most important application domains of containerization and their technological progress. Furthermore, we discuss the performance metrics used in most containerization techniques. Finally, we point out research gaps in the related aspects of containerization technology that require more research.

     

A Scalable Web Server Architecture

This paper describes a scalable architecture for Web servers designed to cope with the ongoing increase of the Internet requirements. In the paper, first the drawbacks of the traditional Web server architecture are discussed, and the need for an innovative solution is described. The proposed design addresses two of the parameters that can dramatically impact the performance of Web servers: (1) the need for a powerful data management system to cope with the increase in the complexity of users' requests; and (2) an efficient caching mechanism to reduce the amount of redundant traffic. In this direction, a scalable solution based on distributed database technology to replace the file system is described, and performance test results of the system are provided. This architecture is further extended by a collaborative caching system that builds up an adaptive hierarchy of caches for Web servers, which allows them to keep up with the changes in the traffic generated by the applications they are running. Finally, some improvements to the proposed architecture are addressed.     

Scalable Federation of Web Cache Servers

Web caches are traditionally organised in a simple tree like hierarchy. In this paper, a new architecture is proposed, where federations of caches are distributed globally, caching data partially. The advantages of the proposed system are that contention on global caches is reduced, while at the same time improving the scalability of the system since extra cache resources can be added on the fly. Among other topics discussed in this papers, is the scalability of the proposed system, the algorithms used to control the federation of Web caches and the approach used to identify the potential Web cache partners. In order to obtain a successful collaborative Web caching system, the formation of federations must be controlled by an algorithm that takes the dynamics of the Internet traffic into consideration. We use the history of Web cache access in order to determine how federations should be formed. Initial performance results of a simulation of a number of nodes are promising.