Containers are lightweight OS-level virtualization. In recent years, container-based virtualization for applications has gained immense popularity thanks to the success of technologies like Docker. Container management is one of the key challenges of adopting this technology. As a result, management middleware like Kubernetes, Mesos, etc., are witnessing widespread adoption in the industry today. While Containers as technology have reached an acceptable level of maturity, we see today that most of the challenges hindering the full-scale adoption of this technology lie in the limitation of the existing middleware managing containerized workloads. Problems around scalability, security, high-availability, disaster recovery, and compliance are still active research areas that require innovative solutions.

The aim of this workshop is to shed light on the main challenges and solutions of running containerized workloads in clustered environments.

The sixth 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 The workshop welcomes submissions describing unpublished research, position papers as well as deployment experiences on various topics related to containers as outlined below: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:
Analyzing Scalability and performance of container management middleware (K8s, Mesos, Swarm...)

- Use cases for containers in Machine Learning workloads

- Security, isolation, and performance of containers in shared environments

- 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 the management of large clusters of containers

- Container use cases and challenges for HPC, Big Data and IoT applications

- Leveraging cognitive techniques for container management

- Performance enhancement of containers

- Use cases of using containers such as serverless computing and PaaS

- Comparative studies between different middleware for managing containers

- Comparative studies between containers, uni-kernels, and any other virtualization technologies

- Other topics relevant to containers management



Submissions:
Accepted papers should be no longer than 6 pages in the standard ACM format. Note that at least one author on each accepted workshop paper must hold a full pre-conference registration. As in previous years, the Middleware conference will provide companion proceedings including all workshop papers, which will be available in the ACM Digital Library. This is subject to the availability of the camera-ready version by October 15, 2020. Please upload your papers in PDF form to hotCFP.

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 ACM Digital Library



For the authors of accepted papers, you will be contacted by the main conference with a specific URL for your camera-ready submission.

Important dates:
Paper submissions: September 21, 2020

Notification of acceptance: October 5, 2020

Camera ready version: October 15, 2020



Organization:
Workshop Chairs:
Ali Kanso – Microsoft

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

Publicity Chair:
Chen Wang - IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Program Committee Chair:
Abdelouahed Gherbi, ETS University, Montreal, Canada

Program Committee (To Be Confirmed):
Michela Taufer, University of Deleware

Jinho Hwang, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Gregor von Laszewski, Indiana University

Olivier Sallou, INRIA

Hassan Hawilo, Western University, Canada

Shivanshi Gupta, Microsoft

Chen Wang, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Ming Zhao, Arizona State University

Abhishek Gupta, Intel

Wubin Li, Ericsson Research, Montreal, Canada

Timothy Wood, George Washington University

Shriram Rajagopalan, VMware

Marco Cello, Nokia Bell Labs

Wei Tan, Citaldel

Manar Jammal, York University, Canada

Yogesh Barve, Vanderbilt University, USA

Vatche Ishakian, IBM Research