Improved rider optimization for optimal container resource allocation in cloud with security assurance

Purpose The containerization application is one among the technologies that enable microservices architectures, which is observed to be the model for operating system (OS) virtualization. Containers are the virtual instances of the OS that are structured as the isolation for the OS atmosphere and its file system, which are executed on the single kernel and a single host. Hence, every microservice application is evolved in a container without launching the total virtual machine. The system overhead is minimized in this way as the environment is maintained in a secured manner. The exploitation of a microservice is as easy to start the execution of a new container. As a result, microservices could scale up by simply generating new containers until the required scalability level is attained. This paper aims to optimize the container allocation. Design/methodology/approach This paper introduces a new customized rider optimization algorithm (C-ROA) for optimizing the container allocation. The proposed model also considers the impact of system performance along with its security. Moreover, a new rescaled objective function is defined in this work that considers threshold distance, balanced cluster use, system failure, total network distance and security as well. At last, the performance of proposed work is compared over other state-of-the-art models with respect to convergence and cost analysis. Findings For experiment 1, the implemented model at 50th iteration has achieved minimal value, which is 29.24%, 24.48% and 21.11% better from velocity updated grey wolf optimisation (VU-GWO), whale random update assisted LA (WR-LA) and rider optimization algorithm (ROA), respectively. Similarly, on considering Experiment 2, the proposed model at 100th iteration attained superior performance than conventional models such as VU-GWO, WR-LA and ROA by 3.21%, 7.18% and 10.19%, respectively. The developed model for Experiment 3 at 100th iteration is 2.23%, 5.76% and 6.56% superior to VU-GWO, WR-LA and ROA. Originality/value This paper presents the latest fictional optimization algorithm named ROA for optimizing the container allocation. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that uses the C-ROA for optimization.