A Container Orchestration Development that Optimizes the Etherpad Collaborative Editing Tool through a Novel Management System

Abstract

The use of collaborative tools has notably increased recently. It is common to see distinct users that need to work simultaneously on shared documents. In most cases, large companies provide tools whose implementations have been a very complicated and expensive task. Likewise, their platform deployment requirements should be robust hardware infrastructures. It becomes even more critical when their main target is to reach scalability and highavailability. Therefore, this study aims to design and implement a microservices-based collaborative architecture using assembled containers in the cloud, enabling them to deploy Etherpad instances to guarantee high availability. To ensure such a task, we developed and optimized a central management system that creates Etherpad instances and continuously interacts with other Etherpad tools running on Docker containers. This design goes from the monolithic Etherpad instantiation and handling towards a service architecture, where every Etherpad is offered as a microservice. Furthermore, the management system follows (implements) the Observer, Factory Method, Proxy, and Service Layerpopular design patterns. This allows users to gain more privacy through access to validations and shared resources. Our results indicate both the correct operation in the automation of containers’ creation for new users who register in the system and quantifiable improvement in performance.

From Monolithic Systems to Microservices: A Comparative Study of Performance

“…Secondly, it focuses on determining the performance and the relationship between different variables such as CPU, memory consumption, network performance, disk operations, and restrictions such as development time, integration, and migration effort of an application that proceeds from a monolithic structure towards one of the microservices. Indeed, this is complementary to [7] and an expansion of our previous work published in [8], where the data from those measurements will let us present a complete critical analysis, and new knowledge related to the evolution from Monolithic to Microservices architectures, including their performance, and development complexity. We also analyze a complete state-of-the-art to assume a critical position regarding what remains to be performed in the given context.…”