Experimental Evaluation of the Virtual Environment Efficiency for Distributed Software Development

At every software design stage nowadays, there is an acute need to solve the problem of effective choice of libraries, development technologies, data exchange formats, virtual environment systems, characteristics of virtual machines. Due to the spread of various kinds of devices and the popularity of Web platforms, lots of systems are developed not for the universal installation on a device (box version), but for a specific architecture with the subsequent provision of web services. Under these conditions, the only way for estimating the efficiency parameters at the design stage is to conduct various kinds of experiments to evaluate the parameters of a particular solution. Using the example of the Web platform of digital psychological tools, the methods for experimental parameter evaluation were developed in the article. The mechanisms and technologies for improving the efficiency of the Vagrant and Docker cloud virtual environment were also proposed in the paper. A set of basic criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the configuration of the virtual development environment has been determined to be rapid deployment; increase in the speed and decrease in the volume of resources used; increase in the speed of data exchange between the host machine and the virtual machine. The results of experimental estimates of the parameters that define the formulated efficiency criteria are given as: processor utilization involved (percentage); the amount of RAM involved (GB); initialization time of virtual machines (seconds); time to assemble the component completely (Build) and to reassemble the component (Watch) (seconds). To improve the efficiency, a file system access driver based on the NFS protocol was studied in the paper.

@article{Kolyasnikov2019,
  title     = {Experimental Evaluation of the Virtual Environment Efficiency for Distributed Software Development},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {10},
  number    = {5},
  year      = {2019},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Pavel Kolyasnikov and Evgeny Nikulchev and Iliy Silakov and Dmitry Ilin and Alexander Gusev},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100539},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100539}
}