aDock: A Cloud Infrastructure Experimentation Environment Based on Open Stack and Docker

A common barrier to experimenting with cloud infrastructure is the lack of access to a fully functional cloud installation. Although Open Stack can be used to create test beds, it is not uncommon in literature to find works that are plagued by unrealistic setups that use only a handful of servers. Moreover, setting up a test bed is necessary but not sufficient. One must also be able to create repeatable experiments that can be used to compare one´s results to baseline or related approaches from the state of the art. We present a Dock, a suite of tools for creating perform ant, sand boxed, and configurable cloud infrastructure experimentation environments based on Open Stack and Docker. Its light-weight approach facilitates the development of Open Stack extensions, allowing one to more easily test them in realistic scenarios. A dock also provides a set of simulation tools that, for now, focus on creating experiments for Virtual Machine Placement and Server Consolidation algorithms. In this paper we also show how a Dock was used to develop a Server Consolidation Service for Nova, and provide an analysis of a Dock´s scalability and simulation capabilities.