Distributed cloud monitoring using Docker as next generation container virtualization technology

Paradigm shift is happening these days that organizations are dismissive towards capital investment on owning infrastructural setup, rather going for cloud services offered by various cloud providers. Cloud providers are accountable to their service that should always be available, reliable and scalable. They speculate lot of time and money on human resources who test the entire cloud relentlessly and make sure it is in compliance with anticipated service-level agreement (SLA). This approach is unacceptable for long term consideration keeping in mind the growing industry need and unpredictable customer loads. Hence the next immediate necessity would be to automate the process. Usually these cloud services are web based and public APIs (North-Bound APIs) are exposed for executing certain actions on Cloud Portal (CP). There can be multiple CP instances across the globe to serve regional requests. This paper proposes an architecture using containers to automate testing of entire cloud environment through North-Bound APIs (NBAPI) of respective CP instances spread across the globe and use it as a foundation for distributed cloud monitoring. A dashboard is developed to manifest a current global health status of cloud with capability of Proactive alert to forestall any undesirable state.