Virtual Infrastructures on the Move: Containers and Virtual Network Migration

Abstract

The cloud computing model enables users to view computational resources as unlimited and that can be dynamically reserved. In addition, users are charged according to a contracted configuration and effective reservation time. Thus, it became possible to dynamically provision Virtual Infrastructures (VIs) composed of virtual machines, containers and virtualized network resources. Due to the flexibility in resource provisioning and configuration, VI is being increasingly adopted for hosting data storage services, development platforms and distributed applications. However, when migrating applications to a cloud, users are faced with a significant amount of providers, brokers and services offered. Above all, cloud computing technologies, although innovative, do not ease the migration of virtualized resources between distinct providers, inducing in vendor lock-in. A wide range of cloud providers, APIs, models and management tools further limit the development of VI migration solutions between providers, characterizing an open challenge. This work proposes a mechanism to perform VI migration among providers, based on an architecture agnostic to source and destination providers, as well as VI-hosted applications. In addition, a prototype based on Docker containers and OpenStack clouds was developed both to validate the proposed mechanism and to serve as a reference implementation.