A reference architecture for the container ecosystem
Madiha Haider Syed, Eduardo B. Fernández · 2018
Containers have gained immense popularity as a portable and lightweight virtualization solution. They facilitate application development, deployment and distribution across computing environments. Their success is also attributed to the support they offer for DevOps teams and for applications developed using a microservices architecture style. Containers are not the only components in the environment but work closely with other components for managing and supporting them, forming an ecosystem. Architectural modeling can be used as a powerful tool to represent ecosystems which helps understand, build and secure such complex systems. We describe in this paper several models we have created for container ecosystem components. These models are abstract, and they help generalize the systems to handle complexity and heterogeneity; they provide a common vocabulary and build holistic and unified views of the systems. The use of UML for modeling improves precision. This can lead to better implementations with respect to reliability, security and interoperability compared to ad hoc methods. A reference architecture will not just facilitate the work of developers and security engineers but also of anyone who aims to ensure compliance, privacy, safety, reliability and/or governance for container ecosystems and we show how to build one. We also describe relationships between container, cloud and IoT ecosystems. This paper is part of our work on developing a security reference architecture for container ecosystems.