Abstract: The Internet is largely a self-organizing system that adapts to changes in its operating environment. In this work, we extend these principles to service infrastructure and introduce ICON, standing for intelligent container. Technically, ICON is a container encapsulating a service that is consumed either directly by end-clients or other services. The novelty of ICON is in the ability of containers to adapt to their environment, targeting near-optimal service delivery and requiring only high-level guidance from the application management. Once deployed, containers form an overlay, observe their setting, and migrate or replicate themselves as needed, to the locations e.g. closest to service consumers. ICON captures our long-term vision for self-organizing service overlays that have the potential for global outreach. Bringing intelligence and adaptation to the level of individual containers renders a decentralized solution that has desirable properties, such as scalability, resilience, reliability, and adaptability to volatile environments. We hope that technology like ICON can open the way for more democratized service provisioning, disintermediating service providers from centralized brokers and optimizing orchestrators. In this talk, we will outline the concept of ICONs, the key parts of the architecture, as well as discuss various adaptation mechanisms ICONs can use.

Bio: Jussi Kangasharju received his MSc from Helsinki University of Technology in 1998. He received his Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies (DEA) from the Ecole Superieure des Sciences Informatiques (ESSI) in Sophia Antipolis in 1998. In 2002 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis/Institut Eurecom. In 2002 he joined Darmstadt University of Technology (TUD), first as a post-doctoral researcher, and from 2004 onwards as an assistant professor. Since June 2007 Jussi is a professor at the department of computer science at the University of Helsinki. Between 2009 and 2012 he was the director of the Future Internet research program at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT). Jussi's research interests are information-centric networks, edge and cloud computing, content distribution, opportunistic networks, and green ICT. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.

Speaker:  Professor Jussi Kangasharju

Affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Helsinki University

Place of Seminar: Zoom