Automated Setup of Multi-cloud Environments for Microservices Applications

Multi-cloud computing has been proposed as a way to reduce vendor dependence, comply with location regulations, and optimize reliability, performance and costs. Meanwhile, microservice architectures are becoming increasingly popular in cloud computing as they promote decomposing applications into small services that can be independently deployed and scaled, thus optimizing resources usage. However, setting up a multi-cloud environment to deploy a microservices-based application is still a very complex and time consuming task. Each microservice may require different functionality (e.g. software platforms, databases, monitoring and scalability tools) and have different location and redundancy requirements. Selection of cloud providers should take into account the individual requirements of each service, as well as the global requirements of reliability and scalability. Moreover, cloud providers can be very heterogeneous and offer disparate functionality, thus hindering comparison. In this paper we propose an automated approach for the selection and configuration of cloud providers for multi-cloud microservices-based applications. Our approach uses a domain specific language to describe the application's multi-cloud requirements and we provide a systematic method for obtaining proper configurations that comply with the application's requirements and the cloud providers' constraints.