Although the cloud computing domain is progressing rapidly, the deployment of various network intensive software utilities in the cloud is still a challenging task. The Quality of Service (QoS) for various gaming, simulations, video-conferencing, video-streaming or even file uploading tasks may be significantly affected by the quality and geolocation of the selected underlying computing resources, which are available only when the specific functionality is required. This study presents a new architecture for geographic orchestration of network intensive software components which is designed for high QoS. Key elements of this architecture are a Global Cluster Manager (GCM) operating within Software Defined Data Centres (SDDCs), a runtime QoS Monitoring System, and a QoS Modeller and Decision Maker for automated orchestration of software utilities. The implemented system automatically selects the best geographically available computing resource within the SDDC according to the developed QoS model of the software component. This architecture is event-driven as the services are deployed and destroyed in real-time for every usage event. The utility of the implemented orchestration technology is verified qualitatively, and in relation to the potential gains of selected QoS metrics by using two network intensive software utilities implemented as containers: an HTTP(S) file upload service and a Jitsi Meet videoconferencing service. The study shows potential for QoS improvements in comparison to existing orchestration systems.

New software engineering technologies facilitate development of applications from reusable software components, such as Virtual Machine and container images (VMI/CIs). Key requirements for the storage of VMI/CIs in public or private repositories are their fast delivery and cloud deployment times. ENTICE is a federated storage facility for VMI/CIs that provides optimisation mechanisms through the use of fragmentation and replication of images and a Pareto Multi-Objective Optimisation (MO) solver. The operation of the MO solver is, however, time-consuming due to the size and complexity of the metadata, * Vlado Stankovski, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, Jamova cesta 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.2 E-mail: vlado.stankovski@fgg.uni-lj.si 1 specifying various non-functional requirements for the management of VMI/CIs, such as geolocation, operational cost and delivery time. In this work, we address this problem with a new semantic approach, which uses an ontology of the federated ENTICE repository, knowledge base and constraint-based reasoning mechanism. Open Source technologies such as Protégé, Jena Fuseki and Pellet were used to develop a solution. Two specific use cases: (1) repository optimisation with offline and (2) online redistribution of VMI/CIs, are presented in detail. In both use cases, data from the knowledge base is provided to the MO solver. It is shown that Pellet based reasoning can be used to reduce the input metadata size used in the optimisation process by taking into consideration the geographic location of the VMI/CIs and the provenance of the VMI fragments. It is shown that this process leads to reduction of the input metadata size for the MO solver by up to 60% and reduction of the total optimization time of the MO solver by up to 68%, while fully preserving the quality of the solution, which is significant.

Abstract-Full mesh is the most commonly used networking topology in Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) based videoconferencing (VC) applications, however, due to its inherently poor scaling capability it is not appropriate for multi-party VC with many participants. Solutions based on centralized media server infrastructures are used to leverage the scaling problem. Service providers adopting centralized approach need to ensure good resource utilization to lower the price, and at the same time provide good Quality of Experience (QoE) to the end users. In practice, even with todays advanced cloud technologies, these two conflicting goals are difficult to achieve simultaneously. In order to tackle this complex problem, we propose an innovative event-driven model, that differs from the traditional multi-tenant service provisioning model. In this work, the architecture and implementation of a WebRTC event-driven multi-party VC, based on Software as a Service (SaaS) principles is presented. A prototype was developed on top of Docker containers and Kubernetes container orchestration technologies, which in our opinion represent key enabling technologies fostering the migration from multi-tenant towards event-driven architectures. The technology readiness to support such time-critical applications is evaluated. The initial results suggest that although there are some trade-offs in terms of performance/resource consumption, our fully functional prototype allows for on-the-fly media server instance creation and destruction in arbitrary cloud provider infrastructure with still acceptable application usability.

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