Application deployment using Microservice and Docker containers: Framework and optimization

In this paper, we first formulate the application deployment problem by examining the features of Docker, the requirements of microservice-based applications, and available resources in cloud data centers. We further propose a communication efficient framework and a suboptimal algorithm to determine the container placement and task assignment. The proposed algorithm works in a distributed and incremental manner, which makes it scalable to massive physical resources and diverse applications under the framework. We validate the efficiency of our solution through comparisons with three existing strategies in Docker Swarm using real traces from Google Cluster. The evaluation results show that the proposed framework and algorithm provide more flexibility and save more cost than existing strategies.