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 The workshop welcomes submissions describing unpublished research, position papers as well as deployment experiences on various topics related to containers as outlined below: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:
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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:
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Submission Deadline: January 10, 2018
Author Notification: January 30, 2018
Camera-ready Deadline: Feb 5, 2018
Workshop date (TBD): April 17-20, 2018

Workshop chairs:
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Seetharami R. Seelam – IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Ali Kanso – IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Publicity chair:
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Parisa Heidari – Ericsson

Program Committee:
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Michela Taufer, University of Deleware
Gregor von Laszewski, Indian University
Olivier Sallou, INRIA
Wei Tang, Google Inc.
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
Wei Tan, Citaldel
Vatche Ishakian, Bentley University