The Shape of Your Cloud: How to Design and Run Polylithic Cloud Applications

Nowadays the major trend in IT dictates deploying applications in the cloud, cutting the monolithic software into small, easily manageable and developable components, and running them in a microservice scheme. With these choices come the questions: which cloud service types to choose from the several available options, and how to distribute the monolith in order to best resonate with the selected cloud features. We propose a model that presents monolithic applications in a novel way and focuses on key properties that are crucial in the development of cloud-native applications. The model focuses on the organization of scaling units, and it accounts for the cost of provisioned resources in scale-out periods and invocation delays among the application components. We analyze dis-aggregated monolithic applications that are deployed in the cloud, offering both Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms. We showcase the efficiency of our proposed optimization solution by presenting the reduction in operation costs as an illustrative example. We propose to group similarly low scale components together in CaaS, while running dynamically scaled components in FaaS. By doing so, the price is decreased as unnecessary memory provisioning is eliminated, while application response time does not show any degradation

HARMLESS: Cost-Effective Transitioning to SDN

Recently, Software-Defined Networking has grown out of being an "intriguing approach" and turned into a "must-have" for communication networks to overcome many long-standing problems of traditional networking. However, there are still some obstacles on the way to the widespread adoption. Current commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) SDN offerings are still in their infancy and are notorious for lacking standards compliance, scalability, and unpredictable performance indicators compared to their legacy counterparts. On the other hand, recent software-based solutions might mitigate these shortcomings, but in terms of cost-efficiency and port density they are in a lower league. Here, we present HARMLESS, a novel SDN switch design that combines the rapid innovation and upgrade cycles of software switches with the port density of hardware-based appliances into a fully data plane-transparent, vendor-neutral and cost-effective solution for smaller enterprises to gain a foothold in this era. The demo showcases the SDN migration of a dumb legacy Ethernet switch to a powerful, fully reconfigurable, OpenFlow-enabled network device without incurring any major performance and latency penalty, nor any substantial price tag enabling to realize many use cases that would have otherwise needed standalone hardware appliances

Optimal Resource Provisioning for Data-intensive Microservices

With the continuous progress of cloud computing, many microservices and complex multi-component applications arise for which resource planning is a great challenge. For example, when it comes to data-intensive cloud-native applications, the tenant might be eager to provision cloud resources in an economical manner while ensuring that the application performance meets the requirements in terms of data throughput. However, due to the complexity of the interplay between the building blocks, adequately setting resource limits of the components separately for various data rates is nearly impossible. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive approach that consists of measuring the resource footprint and data throughput performance of such a microservices-based application, analyzing the measurement results by data mining techniques, and finally formulating an optimization problem that aims to minimize the allocated resources given the performance constraints. We illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach on Cortex, an extension to Prometheus for storing monitored metrics data. The data-intensive nature of this illustrative example stems from realtime monitoring of metrics exposed by a multitude of applications running in a data center and the continuous analysis performed on the collected data that can be fetched from Cortex. We present Cortex’s performance vs resource footprint trade-off, and then we build regression models to predict the microservices’ resource consumption and draw a mathematical programming formulation to optimize the most important configuration parameters. Our most important finding is the linear relationship between resource consumption and application performance, which allows for applying linear regression and linear programming models. After the optimization, we compare our results to Cortex’s recommendation, leading to a CPU reservation reduced by 50-80%

Optimizing Performance and Resource Consumption of Cloud-Native Logging Application Stacks

Nowadays cloud-based applications and Internet of Things use-cases are becoming more and more common in the field of IT benefiting from the virtually limitless resources and microservice-based deployment options available in the cloud. Observability in such environments is key for tracing application execution to detect possible malfunctions and anomalies. Collecting logs can greatly help in this regard, however, a high volume of logging data can add huge costs for the maintenance of the infrastructure gathering monitoring data. In order to increase the profitability of the application, monitoring-related infrastructure needs to have the lowest cost possible while still being able to fully serve the application’s monitoring needs. In this work, we investigate this aspect and provide an evaluation of the resource footprint of one of the most prominent log collection services, Elastic Stack, from the perspective of its write path

Real-Time FaaS: Towards a Latency Bounded Serverless Cloud

Today, Function-as-a-Service is the most promising concept of serverless cloud computing. It makes possible for developers to focus on application development without any system management effort: FaaS ensures resource allocation, fast response time, schedulability, scalability, resiliency, and upgradability. Applications of 5G, IoT, and Industry 4.0 raise the idea to open cloud-edge computing infrastructures for time-critical applications too, i.e., there is a strong desire to pose real-time requirements for computing systems like FaaS. However, multi-node systems make real-time scheduling significantly complex since guaranteeing real-time task execution and communication is challenging even on one computing node with multi-core processors. In this paper, we present an analytical model and a heuristic partitioning scheduling algorithm suitable for real-time FaaS platforms of multi-node clusters. We show that our task scheduling heuristics could outperform existing algorithms by 55%. Furthermore, we propose three conceptual designs to enable the necessary real-time communications. We present the architecture of the envisioned real-time FaaS platform, emphasize its benefits and the requirements for the underlying network and nodes, and survey the related work that could meet these demands

On Measuring the Geographic Diversity of Internet Routes

Route diversity in networks is elemental for establishing reliable, high-capacity connections with appropriate security between endpoints. As for the Internet, route diversity has already been studied at both Autonomous System- and router-level topologies by means of graph theoretical disjoint paths. In this paper we complement these approaches by proposing a method for measuring the diversity of Internet paths in a geographical sense. By leveraging the recent developments in IP geolocation we show how to map the paths discovered by traceroute into geographically equivalent classes. This allows us to identify the geographical footprints of the major transmission paths between end-hosts, and building on our observations, we propose a quantitative measure for geographical diversity of Internet routes between any two hosts

Location, Proximity, Affinity – The Key Factors in FaaS

The Function-as-a-Service paradigm emerged not only as a pricing technique, but also as a programming model promising to simplify developing to the cloud. Interestingly, while placing functions across hosts under the service platform is believed to be flexible, currently the available platforms pay little attention to co-locate connected functions, or data with the respective processing function in order to improve performance. Even though the local function invocation and data access might be an order of magnitude faster than their remote intra-cloud counterparts. In this paper, we therefore propose a Function-asa- Service platform design that reaps the performance benefits of co-location. We build the platform on WebAssembly, a secure and flexible tool for efficient local function invocations, and on a distributed in-memory database, which allows arbitrary data placement. On top we advocate smart placement strategies for function executions and data, decoupled from the functions. Hence we envision good horizontal scaling of functions while keeping the experienced processing latency to that of a single machine case

HARMLESS: Cost-Effective Transitioning to SDN for Small Enterprises

No abstract available

Transition to SDN is HARMLESS: Hybrid ARchitecture for Migrating Legacy Ethernet Switches to SDN

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a new way to operate, manage, and deploy communication networks and to overcome many long-standing problems of legacy networking. However, widespread SDN adoption has not occurred yet due to the lack of a viable incremental deployment path and the relatively immature present state of SDN-capable devices on the market. While continuously evolving software switches may alleviate the operational issues of commercial hardware-based SDN offerings, namely lagging standards-compliance, performance regressions, and poor scaling, they fail to match the cost-efficiency and port density. In this paper, we propose HARMLESS, a new SDN switch design that seamlessly adds SDN capability to legacy network gear, by emulating the OpenFlow switch OS in a separate software switch component. This way, HARMLESS enables a quick and easy leap into SDN, combining the rapid innovation and upgrade cycles of software switches with the port density and cost-efficiency of hardware-based appliances into a fully dataplane-transparent and vendor-neutral solution. HARMLESS incurs an order of magnitude smaller initial expenditure for an SDN deployment than existing turnkey vendor SDN solutions while, at the same time, yields matching, or even better, data plane performance for smaller enterprises