Building a virtual system of systems using docker swarm in multiple clouds

Abstract

The software industry has been embracing the multi-cloud infrastructure for the design and adaptation of complex and distributed software systems. This new hybrid cloud infrastructure makes it possible to mix and match platforms and cloud providers for various software development activities. There are several benefits of the multi-cloud infrastructure such as lower level of vendor lock-in and minimize the risk of widespread data loss or downtime. However, it has many challenges such as non-standard and inherent complexity due to different technologies, interfaces, and services. Docker has introduced container-based software development approach in the past few years and gaining popularity in the software industry. It has recently introduced its distributed system development tool called Swarm, which extends the Docker container-based software development process on multiple hosts in multiple clouds without any interoperability issue. Docker Swarm-based distributed software development is a newborn approach for the cloud industry; nonetheless, it has a huge potential to provide multi-cloud development environment without worrying the complexity of it. This paper presents the simulation of building a virtual system of systems (SoS) for the distributed software development process on multiple clouds. This simulation of virtual SoS is based on Docker Swarm, VirtualBox, Mac OS X, nginx and redis. However, the same SoS can be created on any of the Docker supported cloud by just changing the driver name to the desired cloud name such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, Google Compute Engine, Exoscale, Generic, OpenStack, Rackspace, IBM Softlayer, VMware vCloud Air.