Towards Distributed Software-Defined Environments

Service-based access models coupled with recent advances in application deployment technologies can support emerging dynamic and data-driven applications. However, due to evolving application requirements and the dynamicity of the underlying resources, it is necessary to support flexible and opportunistic composition of services in order to satisfy application needs. The goal of this work is to provide a programmable and dynamic framework that can support these applications. The framework uses software-defined environment concepts to drive the process of dynamically composing infrastructure services from multiple providers. The resulting distributed software-defined environment autonomously evolves over the application life cycle while meeting objectives and constraints set by the users, applications, and/or resource providers. We present two different approaches for programming resources and controlling the composition process, one that is based on a rule engine and another that leverages constraint programming. Preliminary results demonstrate the framework operation and performance using simulations and real experiments running Docker containers across multiple clouds.