Failover Timing Analysis in Orchestrating Container-based Critical Applications

Emerging industrial applications require highly reconfigurable and flexible environments to effectively respond to dynamic market demands while complying with rigorous nonfunctional requirements. The orchestration of virtualized industrial components over edge/fog computing infrastructures allows the required reconfigurability to be achieved by enforcing automated management of hardware resources and applications. However, existing orchestration systems fall short of meeting crucial nonfunctional requirements, such as determinism, reliability, and application/criticality awareness, preventing their use in industrial environments. In this short paper, we conduct a preliminary timing analysis on failover mechanisms used in Kubernetes in order to identify sources of nondeterminism, which are fundamental to be mitigated in an industrial mixed-criticality scenario.