Cluster as a Service: a Container based Cluster Sharing Approach with multi-user Support

With the rapid development of cloud computing and big data processing, more and more application frameworks are being considered to run in “cloud way”. This brings about several challenges to the cloud computing platform, e.g., being able to run most existing heterogeneous applications, providing scalability and elasticity support for newly emerged frameworks, and most importantly, sharing cluster resources effectively. In this paper, we propose a new service model that is suitable for medium and small-sized data center to solve these problems in a relatively easy and general way – ClaaS (Cluster as a Service). The idea is virtualizing the cluster environment for application frameworks. Most applications can directly run in the virtual cluster environment without any modification, which is a great advantage. Based on lightweight containers, we implement a real system of ClaaS named Docklet in order to prove the feasibility of this service model. In the meantime, we preliminarily design the definition of applications to make them easy to deploy. Finally, we present several examples and evaluate the whole system.