Over the course of this semester I have been musing over the potential project that I could do for PRJ701 in the following semester, as well as serving as the practice run-up assignment for RES701. Whilst, due to my selected major, the general nature of the project was always going to be focused in on that of networking, server operation and infrastructure as whole, I was still uncertain as to what, specifically, I would be looking to do for this project. However, following the evaluation of two papers, one to a minor degree covering the usage of OpenStack and its comparative performance as compared to non-virtualized hardware usage (Grzonka, D. (2015)) and the more in-depth analysis of the usage of containerization technology in PaaS cloud systems (Pahl, C. (2015)), I believe I have come to a general idea regarding the field of interest I will pursue.
Specifically, I have decided that I would like to setup a model PaaS system using spare TALOS architecture (having already briefly spoken with Mark in regards to this being a plausible scenario at this point in time) with containerisation technology utilized for the usage of n-tier (most likely 3-tier) software. For the infrastructure side of the project, I will be utilizing OpenStack (What is Openstack, 2017) for the pooling of resources and the creation of stacks, Docker (What is Docker, 2017) as the container engine and, at least at this time, Kubernetes (What is Kubernetes?, 2017) for automation elements of containers and the application side as a whole. As for the application side of the project, I am still unsure as to what I will be using to showcase the usage of this technology, especially considering that the setup of the infrastructure side of this project will take a considerable amount of time alone. As such, I may consider the usage of previously created 2/3-tier architecture software as a showcase, with modifications done by myself to make the software more susceptible to operation in a containerized cloud environment.
With a general idea of what I wish to do with myself during the project, the question now becomes how can I take the components above and combine them into a working project goal, the specific relation as to how this project will further my infrastructure major and to potentially make as start on the background to this project as a whole.
References
What is Docker. (2017, 05 03). Retrieved from Docker: https://www.docker.com/what-docker
What is Kubernetes? (2017, 26 10). Retrieved from Kubernetes: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/what-is-kubernetes/
What is Openstack. (2017, 05 15). Retrieved from Openstack: https://www.openstack.org/software/
Pahl, C. (2015). Containerization and the paas cloud. IEEE Cloud Computing, 2(3), 24-31.
Grzonka, D. (2015). The analysis of openstack cloud computing platform: Features and performance. Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, (3), 52.
RES701 - Luke Warren 