Containerised Application Profiling and Classification Using Benchmarks

Abstract

Along with the rise of cloud and edge computing has come a plethora of solutions that regard the deployment and operation of different types of applications in such environments. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers offer a number of different hardware solutions to facilitate the needs of the growing number of distributed applications. It is critical in this landscape to be able to navigate and discover the best-suited infrastructure solution for the applications, taking into account not only the cost of operation but also the quality of service (QoS) required for any given application. The proposed solution has two main research developments: (a) the creation and optimisation of multidimensional vectors that represent the hardware usage profiles of an application, and (b) the assimilation of a machine learning classification algorithm, in order to create a system that can create hardware-agnostic profiles of a vast variety of containerised applications in terms of nature and computational needs and classify them to known benchmarks. Given that benchmarks are widely used to evaluate a system’s hardware capabilities, having a system that can help select which benchmarks best correlate to a given application can help an IaaS provider make a more informed decision or recommendation on the hardware solution, not in a broad sense, but based on the needs of a specific application.