Inter-Cloud application migration and portability using Linux containers for better resource provisioning and interoperability

In a cloud computing environment, availability, efficient resource utilization, fault tolerance and feasible resource provisioning is of primary concern. There are certain situations in which a virtual machine is running on top of a physical host and needs to be migrated for various reasons such as maintenance or lack of hardware resource availability. Live application migration is one of the widely used technique to address these concerns and this is achieved by migrating virtual machines over a network to another physical host. But migrating a virtual machine over a network uses up the bandwidth because along with the application an operating system is also transferred which adds as an overhead along with the application. A Linux container on the other hand is much more lighter since it uses the underlying operating system making it a prominent candidate for application migration. In this research paper application migration is done by migrating a Linux container over a network by considering the following factors: 1) Availability of the underlying network. 2) Consideration of total changes in the while migration 3) Availability of compute time in the destination host. The paper also sheds a light into the possibility of migrating a work load easily without thinking of the huge cost and time associated with migration of application among nodes