ABSTRACT

In Software Engineering, a Container is a self-contained package of software that includes all of the necessary elements to run in any environment. To deploy software rapidly to customers, organizations use container orchestration. Container orchestration is the practice of pragmatically managing containers at scale, where hundreds of containers, i.e., lightweight computer virtualization tools, can be automatically provisioned and managed. Container orchestration is expected to reach USD 1.3 billion worth of market value by 2026. While this practice has yielded benefits, resiliency for container orchestration remains a challenge for organizations. Without resilient implementation of container orchestration, deployed software becomes unreliable, creating large-scale consequences for organizations and their customers. As certain characteristics are unique to container orchestration, foundational scientific research investigations are necessary. Execution of these research investigations will yield new scientific evidence, generate novel techniques unique to container orchestration, and advance the state of software engineering research. All software generated from the project will be publicly available to industry practitioners, research software engineers, and academics for usage. Datasets generated from the project will be beneficial to the entire software engineering community to conduct further research. The project will also foster broadening of participation in STEM by pro-actively involving students from under-represented groups. Through dissemination of generated research into graduate and undergraduate courses, students will gain knowledge on resilient container orchestration, which will directly contribute to the nation's ongoing efforts in developing a knowledgeable cyber infrastructure workforce, emphasized by the U.S. National Strategic Computing Initiative.

This project will conduct research activities to investigate how to integrate resiliency into the practice of container orchestration. The focus of this project is to grow the science of resilient operations for deployment units, which are pivotal to perform container orchestration. This project will execute two tasks: (i) resilient provisioning of deployment units through detection of discrepant states and resilient volume management, and (ii) resilient routing of traffic between deployment units through detection of firewall and zonal discrepancies. This project will identify root causes of deployment, volume, and zonal discrepancies that are unique to container orchestration.

This project is jointly funded by CISE Software and Hardware Foundations program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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