Co-located and Orchestrated Network Fabric (CONF): An Automated Cloud Virtual Infrastructure for Social Network Applications

Cloud environments can provide virtualized, elastic, control- lable and high-quality on-demand infrastructure services for supporting complex distributed applications. However, existing IaaS (Infrastructure- as-a-Service) solutions mainly focus on the automated integration or de- ployment of generic applications; they lack flexible infrastructure plan- ning and provisioning solutions and do not have rich support for the high service quality and trustworthiness required by social network ap- plications. This paper introduces an automated cloud virtual infrastruc- ture solution for social network applications, called Co-located and Or- chestrated Network Fabric (CONF), which was conducted in a recently funded EU H2020 project ARTICONF. CONF aims to improve the ex- isting infrastructure support in the DevOps lifecycle of social network applications to optimize QoS performance metrics as well as ensure fast recovery in the presence of faults or performance drops.