A REST Service Framework for Fine-Grained Resource Management in Container-Based Cloud

Although many current Cloud computing platforms are still based on virtual machines running on hyper visors, there are two trends towards a more flexible and efficient Cloud computing paradigm. One trend is the Resource-as-a-Service (RaaS) based Cloud, where the fine-grained resources can be rented at short time intervals. The other one is the container-based Cloud, where the lightweight containers replace the virtual machines. Both trends require a more flexible and efficient resource management framework to address the increased demands for scalability, heterogeneity, flexibility, deployment density, and efficiency. To provide such a resource management framework, this paper describes a REST service framework based on the concept of Resource-Oriented Network (RON) that decouples the resource representation plane, control plane, and data plane. Created by an automated top-down development process, RON provides uniform and cohesive REST APIs to manage the fine-grained resources for processes, tasks, jobs, containers, servers, and clusters, by encapsulating the underlying Linux resource control models. In addition, we present a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) architecture to secure the access to RON in the Cloud. A prototype system has been implemented and our experimental results show that the approach is feasible and the performance is consistent with the client and server workloads.