An agile container-based approach to TaaS

Current cloud deployment scenarios imply a need for fast testing of user oriented software in diverse, heterogeneous and often unknown hardware and network environments, making it difficult to ensure optimal or reproducible in-site testing. The current paper proposes the use of container based lightweight virtualization with a ready-to-run, just-intime deployment strategy in order to minimize time and resources needed for streamlined multicomponent prototyping in PaaS systems. To that end, we will study a specific case of use consisting of providing end users with pre-tested custom prepackaged and preconfigured software, guaranteeing the viability of the aforementioned custom software, the syntactical integrity of the provided deployment system, the availability of needed dependencies as well as the sanity check of the already deployed and running software. From an architectural standpoint, by using standard, common use deployment packages as Chef or Puppet hosted in parallellizable workloads over ready-to-run Docker images, we can minimize the time required for full-deployment multicomponent systems testing and validation, as well as wrap the commonly provided features via a user-accessible RESTful API. The proposed infrastructure is currently available and freely accessible as part of the FIWARE EU initiative, and is open to third party collaboration and extension from a FOSS perspective.