A Container Orchestration Development that Optimizes the Etherpad Collaborative Editing Tool through a Novel Management System

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors address the problem of real-time collaborative text editing from multiple devices based on the concept of microservices. The conversion of a monolithic collaborative application called Etherpad into a microservices application. The authors customized the Etherpad image through the Docker and provide a management system.

The title is a bit convoluted. You can have a better title than what you have. The writing requires paper needs substantial efforts to understand mainly due to numerous grammatical (e.g., ‘there is has not been evidence of’) and structural mistakes throughout the article. The material in section 3 can be compressed as the contents are readily available online.

There are several study covering the same topic. One contribution the authors claimed is the conversion of a monolithic application into a microservices application. Several such prior work exists. Few are cited and others not. The problem is that the authors justify their work on claims such as exiting working ‘did not explain how the results were quantified’ or ‘we analyzed CPU and RAM consumption.’ It would be nice if you can explain how the related work differ from your work in concrete and significant terms rather than trivial points.

You need to define concepts such as reliability and scalability. Also, scalability is one of your criticism about the existing systems. You are using a central management system, which basically have serious problems in terms of scalability. How do you reconcile these?

Fig 4 shows a microservices architecture. This is a standard architecture and not clear what makes it different from the existing once and not enough information regarding how it adds any value to exiting architectures. What the authors call ‘management system’ other authors call it ‘monitoring tools’ both with the same functionality.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall the paper would benefit being proof-read by an editor. There are instances of lack of grammar which can make the corresponding sentence ambiguous or confusing. This does not effect the scientific content of course, but it makes it a more laborious read, especially for someone who is not a specialist in the field. There are also instances where an incorrect word has been used, such as in line 118 you refer to a 'crescent' number of users.

The paragraph starting on line 88 is confusing, it sounds like you (the authors) are describing the work in [12] as if it were your own. I'm not really sure if you have just lifted something out the paper ([12]) and pasted it in or whether you are comparing your current work to that of [12]. Even if you were the authors of [12] you should be speaking from the point of view of the current research. If you are comparing your current work to this previous work you need to make this clearer.

If there is more than one author on a cited paper you need to include either all the surnames or use 'et al.' after the primary author's surname when describing the work. There are many cases where you haven't done this and at least one where the first name is used instead of the surname.

When comparing your current work to previous work it makes more sense to complete the discussion on all previous work before commenting on how your work fits in. Maybe collate the discussion about your current work in this section into a paragraph at the end of this section, or under a section called, 'Our Contributions'. It is not too clear how your work fits into current literature. 

The background information, method and results are thorough and clearly presented. Care just needs to be taken with the small details such as language and grammar.

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

(Please refer to the attachment.)

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper has been improved but the central claim, which is scalability and synchronization, as the main contribution compared to the exiting approaches are not substantiated. It is important to convincingly show that the contributions of your work is significant.

Let me re-iterate my original concerns. Existing approaches are centralized and so does yours. Scalability and single-point of failure are well known issues with centralised systems. Single-point of failure will have significant impact on synchronization.

In your response to my comment, you explained how master-slave (centralised system) works ‘...Docker Swarm automatically delegates to a master node to orchestrate the work of the slave nodes. Similarly, it is responsible for load balancing within the worker nodes.” You also, mentioned “microservices provide scalability and availability that they offer within any proposed architecture, as stated by the scientific community”, which means that all existing works that are based on the concept of ‘microservices’ are scalable and your work is no different from them.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In the revised manuscript, the authors have redesigned the visual representation of the proposed design architecture, where the difference of the contribution of the study with related work is distinguished. The revised manuscript is focused on the developed and optimized a central management system that creates Etherpad instances and continuously interacts with other Etherpad tools running on Docker containers. This design goes from the monolithic Etherpad instantiation and handling towards a service architecture, where every Etherpad is offered as a microservices. Furthermore, the management system follows and implements the Observer, Factory Method, Proxy, and Service Layer popular design patterns. This allows users to gain more privacy through access to validations and shared resources. The revised manuscript is satisfactory and can be beneficial to readers. Therefore, I would like to recommend the publication.

Author Response

We appreciate your comments and contributions. The new version is being loaded