mira: an Application Containerisation Pipeline for Small Software Development Teams in Low Resource Settings

Abstract

Cloud native applications leverage Development and Operation (DevOps), microservice architectures and containerisation for primarily availability, resilience and scalability reasons. Small developer teams in low resource settings have unique DevOps needs and harnessing its principles and practices is technically challenging and distinctly difficult in these contexts. We conducted a survey with professional developers, students and researchers situated and working in a low resource setting and the results indicate that these principles and practices are relatively new. In application containerisation, an operating system virtualisation method that can significantly optimize the use of computing resources, the respondents indicated challenges in the process steps. Particularly, small developer teams in low resource settings require custom tools and abstractions for software development and delivery automation. Informed by the developer needs, we designed and developed a custom automated containerisation pipeline, mira, for a managed cloud native platform situated in a low-resource setting. We validate mira against 6 major application frameworks, tools and/or languages and successful deployment of the resultant applications onto a cloud native platform.