Monitoring and Billing of A Lightweight Cloud System Based on Linux Container

Nowadays, more and more enterprises and research institutes choose to build mini-datacenters and deploy private cloud environments to meet growing business and research needs. To make users can run different application frameworks on the same datacenter, Cao et al. [5] proposed a new service model named ClaaS (Cluster as a Service) and developed a lightweight prototype system named Docklet which is based on LXC (Linux Container). Docklet faces a problem of resources waste and abuse due to our free policy. This paper introduces the monitoring and billing modules of Docklet in order to solve this problem. Monitoring module provides users and administrators with a clear, real-time and detailed monitoring interface to understand the statues of running applications and the usage of physical resources. Billing module uses these data to remind users to release unnecessary resources. An experiment and observations show that our proposed monitoring method is effective and lightweight and our proposed billing model increases the utilization of physical resources of a mini-datacenter.