From VM to Container: A Linear Program for Outsourcing a Business Process to Cloud Containers

Cloud computing has been recently empowered with a new service offering called Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS). This offers horizontally scalable, deployable systems and it bypasses high-performance challenges of traditional hypervisors when deploying applications. This paper assists in using CaaS for business process outsourcing to the cloud–an emerging trend that still faces several problems. In particular, this paper concentrates on the resource allocation problem from an enterprise perspective and proposes a linear program (LP) that finds out the optimal deployment of a business process on cloud containers. The herein reported experimental results show the effectiveness and performance of the LP compared to both the classic deployment (VM-based deployment) and the container First Fit strategy.