Containers are a lightweight OS-level virtualization abstraction primarily based on namespace isolation and control groups. In the recent years, container-based virtualization for applications has gained immense popularity thanks to the success of technologies like Docker. Container packaging mechanisms like Docker, LXD and Rkt, as well as management frameworks like Kubernetes, Mesos, etc., are witnessing widespread adoption in the industry today. Container technologies have eliminated the feature parity between development and production environment by enabling developers to package applications and their dependencies as a single unit that can be run across diverse operating environments.

Though containers provide a great amount of flexibility and portability from a developer's perspective, there are several important challenges that need to be addressed by the infrastructure provider, in order to run these virtualized applications in a cloud environment. The fourth workshop on container technologies and container clouds solicits contributions in this area from researchers and practitioners in both the academia and industry. The workshop welcomes submissions describing unpublished research, position papers as well as deployment experiences on various topics related to containers as outlined below:

Topics of interested include but are not limited to:

• Security, isolation and performance of containers
• Network architectures for multi-host container deployments
• Orchestration models for cloud scale deployments
• High availability systems for containerized workloads
• Leveraging hardware support for containers and containerized workloads
• Migrating and optimizing traditional workloads for containers
• Operational issues surrounding management of large clusters of containers
• Container use cases and challenges for HPC, Big Data and IoT applications
• Leveraging cognitive techniques for containers
• Performance enhancement of containers
• Use cases of using containers such as serverless computing and PaaS
• Comparative studies between containers, uni-kernels, and any other virtualization technologies
• Other topics relevant to containers

Submissions:

Submissions are single blind and should follow the IEEE conference guidelines for formatting. They can be in one of the two formats: a traditional 5 page paper (excluding references) or a 2 page extended abstract/proposal for operational experiences and position pieces. The category of submission (paper or extended abstract) should be mentioned in the title. Please upload your papers in PDF form to easychair.

Submissions will be judged on novelty, relevance, clarity of presentation, and correctness. Authors of accepted submissions are required to present their work. Accepted papers and abstracts will be made available in the conference website at least one week before the workshop, so that the participants can come prepared having read the papers. Accepted submissions will be published via IEEExplore.

Important dates:

• Submission Deadline: January 10, 2018 (An extension till the 15th of January has been granted on demand)
• Author Notification: January 30, 2018
• Camera-ready Deadline: Feb 5, 2018
• Workshop date: April 17, 2018 (from 8:30 am to 12:00 pm)

Program:

Room: Challenger 38-39 Level 3

• Workshop Opening: 8:30 am - 9:00 am
• Keynote session: 9:00 am - 10:00 am
  • Title: Container Security
  • Abstract:
    • Container Security has evolved ever since Docker containers were introduced. This talk will give an overview of this evolution, and where container security is heading next.
  • Speaker: Dr. Salman Baset, CTO Security, IBM
    • Presentation
• Break: 10:00 am - 10:30 am
• Paper session: 10:30 am - 12:00 pm (30 minutes each: 25 minutes presentation + 5 minutes Q&A)
  1. Containerizing for heterogeneous HPC applications in the Cloud
     • Malik Khan and Anne C. Elster
  2. Container-based Performance Evaluation: A Survey and Challenges
     • Naylor G. Bachiega, Paulo S. L. Souza, Sarita M. Bruschi and Simone Do R. S. de Souza
       • Presentation
  3. Container Memory Allocation Discrepancies: An Investigation on Memory Utilization Gaps for Container-Based Application Deployments
     • Garrett Lahmann, Thom McCann and Wes Lloyd
       • Presentation

Workshop Chairs:

Seetharami R. Seelam – IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Ali Kanso – IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Publicity Chair:

Parisa Heidari – Ericsson

Program Committee:

Michela Taufer, University of Deleware

Gregor von Laszewski, Indiana University

Olivier Sallou, INRIA

Chen Wang, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Ming Zhao, Arizona State University

Abhishek Gupta, Intel

Abdelouahed Gherbi, ETS University, Montreal, Canada

Wubin Li, Ericsson Research, Montreal, Canada

Timothy Wood, George Washington University

Shriram Rajagopalan, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Marco Cello, Nokia Bell Labs

Wei Tan, Citaldel

Vatche Ishakian, Bentley University