COPA: Experimenter-Level Container Orchestration for Networking Testbeds

As Cloud Computing (CC) branched areas such as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and Fog computing are still on growing research interest. The creation of new tools to improve quality and speed the experimentation in such areas is a general interest. In this article, we propose COPA, an experimenter-level container orchestration tool for networking testbeds. This tool provides a friendly interface for the experimenter test container orchestration algorithms which can start, stop, copy, and even migrate a container from one host to another. COPA also includes network/resources monitoring to feed the experimenter's orchestration algorithm so that it can make decisions based on real-time environment information. Furthermore, the experimenter can automatize the experiment scenario setup and deployment by pre-configuring in COPA. This tool helps the experimenter in testing different scenarios and quickly changing experiment parameters. Considering these features, COPA aims to provide an experimentation architecture to deploy and test container orchestration algorithms. Furthermore, we provide a case study explaining how COPA can be a key tool in the MEC and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) experimentation environments. This tool was already deployed in Federated Union of Telecommunications Research Facilities for an EU-Brazil Open Laboratory (FUTEBOL) testbeds as part of the control framework and was well validated by the project reviewers and partners.