Orchestration of cloud-based services and infrastructure: An exploratory analysis of Juju, Kubernetes, and Terraform

Abstract:

With the sudden development of cloud computing, different models have been adopted in the context of modern information technology infrastructures, e.g., Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC), Metal as a Service (MaaS). Notwithstanding, and despite all the advantages offered by this new technological environment, mostly characterized by a great heterogeneity of micro-services (i.e, smaller source code, more fragmented states), its orchestration becomes visibly in a more complex task for the system administrator. It requires coordination between a vast number of components and computational resources to meet the user's needs in real-time. Therefore, the present work offers an exploratory analysis of three existing solutions for the orchestration of cloud-based services and infrastructure, namely Juju, Kubernetes, and Terraform. Through a preliminary review of the recent scientific literature, the main characteristics, advantages and use cases of the three analyzed technologies are discussed. It is thus expected to better support the decision-making of the system administration professionals within this scope.

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