Tamas Kiss, University of Westminister

Scientific and commercial applications require resource scalability that cloud computing infrastructures can provide. However, utilizing elasticity of clouds from and application’s perspective is not trivial. COLA (Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application) is an European project which designs and implements a fully modular framework called MiCADO (Microservice-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator) to support auto-scaling and optimization of cloud applications. MiCADO is based on widely used open source technologies, such as Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus or Occopus, and its modular structure means that components can be easily replaced with alternative technologies on demand. The framework supports auto-scaling at both container and virtual machine levels, and enables highly customisable scaling policies. Application description, resource requirements and policies are provided in the form of a standardized TOSCA-based Application Description Template. MiCADO has been prototyped and benchmarked with several scientific and industry applications, for example discrete event and agent based simulation applications and with data intensive web applications.