Abstract
Elasticity is a fundamental property in cloud computing that has recently witnessed major developments. This article reviews both classical and recent elasticity solutions and provides an overview of containerization, a new technological trend in lightweight virtualization. It also discusses major issues and research challenges related to elasticity in cloud computing. We comprehensively review and analyze the proposals developed in this field. We provide a taxonomy of elasticity mechanisms according to the identified works and key properties. Compared to other works in literature, this article presents a broader and detailed analysis of elasticity approaches and is considered as the first survey addressing the elasticity of containers.
INTRODUCTION
CLOUD computing has been gaining more popularity in the last decade and has received a great deal of attention from both industrial and academic worlds. The main factor motivating the use of cloud platforms is their ability to provide resources according to the customer’s needs or what is referred to as elastic provisioning and deprovisioning. Therefore, elasticity is one of the key features in cloud computing that dynamically adjusts the amount of allocated resources to meet changes in workload demands [1].
6 CONCLUSION
Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular; it is being used extensively by many enterprises with a rapid growing. The key feature that makes cloud platforms attractive is elasticity. Elasticity allows providing elastic resources according to the needs in an optimal way. In this article, a comprehensive study about elasticity is provided. It started by talking about the elasticity definitions, and its related terms scalability and efficiency. We have suggested an extended classification for the elasticity strategies based on the existing academic and commercial solutions. The proposed classification or taxonomy covers many features and aspects of the cloud elasticity based on the analysis of diverse proposals. Each aspect is then discussed in details providing examples from the proposed proposals that handle cloud elasticity. We have talked about the containerization and the orchestration tools where elasticity will be popular in this new technology. Many works on the container elasticity are presented. Finally, challenges and new research perspectives are presented.
