Towards Shareable and Reproducible Cloud Computing Experiments

Containerization has emerged as a systematic way of sharing experiments comprising of code, data, and environment. Containerization isolates dependencies of an experiment and allows the computational results to be regenerated. Several new advancements within containerization make it further easy to encapsulate applications and share lighter-weight containers. However, using containerization for cloud computing experiments requires further improvements both at the container runtime level and the infrastructure-level. In this paper, we lay a vision for using containers as a dominant method for efficient sharing and improved reproducibility of cloud computing experiments. We advocate use of container-compliant cloud infrastructures, inclusion of performance profiles of the application or system architecture on which experiments were performed, and methods for statistical comparison across different container executions. We also outline challenges in the achieving this vision and propose existing solutions that can be adapted and propose new methods that can help with automation.