SPIRIT : A microservice-based framework for interactive Cloud infrastructure planning

The IaaS model provides elastic infrastructure that enables

the migration of legacy applications to cloud environments. Many cloud

computing vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and

Google Cloud Platform offer a pay-per-use policy that allows for a sustainable

reduction in costs compared to on-premise hosting, as well as

enable users to choose various geographically distributed data centers.

Using state-of-the-art planning algorithms can help application owners to

estimate the size and characteristics of the underlying cloud inveterate.

However, it’s not always clear which is the optimal solution especially

in multi-cloud environments with complex application requirements and

QoS constraints. In this paper, we propose an open framework named

SPIRIT, which allows a user to include cloud infrastructure planning

algorithms and to evaluate and compare their solutions. SPIRIT achieves

this by allowing users to interactively study infrastructure planning algorithms

by adjusting parameters via a graphical user interface, which

visualizes the results of these algorithms. In the current prototype, we

have included from the IaaS Partial Critical Path algorithm. By taking

advantage of SPIRIT’s microservice-based architecture and its generic

interfaces a user can add to the framework, new planning algorithms.

SPIRIT can transform an abstract workflow described using the CWL

to a concrete infrastructure described using the TOSCA specification.

This way the infrastructure descriptions can be ranked on various key

performance indicators.