DOCMA: A Decentralized Orchestrator for Containerized Microservice Applications

The advent of the Internet-of-Things and its associated applications are key business and technological drivers in industry. These pose challenges that modify the playing field for Internet and cloud service providers who must enable this new context. Applications and services must now be deployed not only to clusters in data centers but also across data centers and all the way to the edge. Thus, a more dynamic and scalable approach toward the deployment of applications in the edge computing paradigm is necessary. We propose DOCMA, a fully distributed and decentralized orchestrator for containerized microservice applications built on peer-to-peer principles to enable vast scalability and resiliency. Secure ownership and control of each application are provided that do not require any designated orchestration nodes in the system as it is automatic and self-healing. Experimental results of DOCMA's performance are presented to highlight its ability to scale.