Following on the successful completion of our collaborative project on building and evaluating private cloud for defence systems, our second project is on building and evaluating secure and scalable private cloud using container technologies. For our projects, we use Openstack software for private cloud and its related technologies. For evaluating the security and scalability of private cloud infrastructure built using container technologies such as Docker.

This project has been partly motivated by the increasing popularity of contain technologies for virtualization and building private cloud as the container technologies, for example Docker, offer lightweight solutions that can be easily ported to other infrastructures if required, require minimal resources, and instantly spawn a new instance whoever required.

Whilst the container technologies, such as Docker, RKT, and LXD, are being used by many organisations, there are not many instances of containers being used in production environments. One of the key reasons is the security related issues of container technologies are not well understood and resolved yet. One of the goals of our collaborative project to build private cloud with different containers technologies and use different scenarios and benchmarks to evaluate the security related aspects of containers based private colds. Our project will also be evaluating the scalability of the private clouds built using container technologies – for evaluating scalability of the containers technologies based private clouds with with rewards to a type-2 hypervisor KVM. We will be releasing the incremental results of our experimental project in terms of a working document that would be regularly updated for sharing the found knowledge and our own observations and upon the completion of the project, we will release a comprehensive technical report that is expected to provide a set of guidelines to people interested in experimenting with containers for building and leveraging private cloud.