Towards an open cloud marketplace: vision and first steps

As one of the most promising, emerging concepts in Information Technology (IT), cloud computing is transforming how IT is consumed and managed; yielding improved cost efficiencies, and delivering flexible, on-demand scalability by reducing computing infrastructures, platforms, and services to commodities acquired and paid-for on-demand through a set of cloud providers. Today, the transition of cloud computing from a subject of research and innovation to a critical infrastructure is proceeding at an incredibly fast pace. A potentially dangerous consequence of this speedy transition to practice is the premature adoption, and ossification, of the models, technologies, and standards underlying this critical infrastructure. This state of affairs is exacerbated by the fact that innovative research on production-scale platforms is becoming the purview of a small number of public cloud providers. Specifically, the academic research communities are effectively excluded from the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the evolution not to mention innovation and healthy mutation of cloud computing technologies. As the dependence on our society and economy on cloud computing increases, so does the realization that the academic research community cannot be shut out from contributing to the design and evolution of this critical infrastructure. In this article we provide an alternative vision that of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX) a public cloud marketplace, where many stakeholders, rather than just a single cloud provider, participate in implementing and operating the cloud, thus creating an ecosystem that will bring the innovation of a broader community to bear on a much healthier and more efficient cloud marketplace

Total order broadcast for fault tolerant exascale systems

In the process of designing a new fault tolerant run-time for future exascale systems, we discovered that a total order broadcast would be necessary. That is, nodes of a supercomputer should be able to broadcast messages to other nodes even in the face of failures. All messages should be seen in the same order at all nodes. While this is a well studied problem in distributed systems, few researchers have looked at how to perform total order broadcasts at large scales for data availability. Our experience implementing a published total order broadcast algorithm showed poor scalability at tens of nodes. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for total order broadcast which scales logarithmically in the number of processes and is not delayed by most process failures. While we are motivated by the needs of our run-time we believe this primitive is of general applicability. Total order broadcasts are used often in datacenter environments and as HPC developers begins to address fault tolerance at the application level we believe they will need similar primitives

MultiLibOS: an OS architecture for cloud computing

Cloud computing is resulting in fundamental changes to computing infrastructure, yet these changes have not resulted in corresponding changes to operating systems. In this paper we discuss some key changes we see in the computing infrastructure and applications of IaaS systems. We argue that these changes enable and demand a very different model of operating system. We then describe the MulitLibOS architecture we are exploring and how it helps exploit the scale and elasticity of integrated systems while still allowing for legacy software run on traditional OSes

EbbRT: Elastic Building Block Runtime - case studies

We present a new systems runtime, EbbRT, for cloud hosted applications. EbbRT takes a different approach to the role operating systems play in cloud computing. It supports stitching application functionality across nodes running commodity OSs and nodes running specialized application specific software that only execute what is necessary to accelerate core functions of the application. In doing so, it allows tradeoffs between efficiency, developer productivity, and exploitation of elasticity and scale. EbbRT, as a software model, is a framework for constructing applications as collections of standard application software and Elastic Building Blocks (Ebbs). Elastic Building Blocks are components that encapsulate runtime software objects and are implemented to exploit the raw access, scale and elasticity of IaaS resources to accelerate critical application functionality. This paper presents the EbbRT architecture, our prototype and experimental evaluation of the prototype under three different application scenarios

EbbRT: a framework for building per-application library operating systems

Efficient use of high speed hardware requires operating system components be customized to the application work- load. Our general purpose operating systems are ill-suited for this task. We present EbbRT, a framework for constructing per-application library operating systems for cloud applications. The primary objective of EbbRT is to enable high-performance in a tractable and maintainable fashion. This paper describes the design and implementation of EbbRT, and evaluates its ability to improve the performance of common cloud applications. The evaluation of the EbbRT prototype demonstrates memcached, run within a VM, can outperform memcached run on an unvirtualized Linux. The prototype evaluation also demonstrates an 14% performance improvement of a V8 JavaScript engine benchmark, and a node.js webserver that achieves a 50% reduction in 99th percentile latency compared to it run on Linux

EbbRT: Elastic Building Block Runtime - overview

EbbRT provides a lightweight runtime that enables the construction of reusable, low-level system software which can integrate with existing, general purpose systems. It achieves this by providing a library that can be linked into a process on an existing OS, and as a small library OS that can be booted directly on an IaaS node

EbbRT: a customizable operating system for cloud applications

Efficient use of hardware requires operating system components be customized to the application workload. Our general purpose operating systems are ill-suited for this task. We present Genesis, a new operating system that enables per-application customizations for cloud applications. Genesis achieves this through a novel heterogeneous distributed structure, a partitioned object model, and an event-driven execution environment. This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of Genesis, and evaluates its ability to improve the performance of common cloud applications. The evaluation of the Genesis prototype demonstrates memcached, run within a VM, can outperform memcached run on an unvirtualized Linux. The prototype evaluation also demonstrates an 14% performance improvement of a V8 JavaScript engine benchmark, and a node.js webserver that achieves a 50% reduction in 99th percentile latency compared to it run on Linux

Using Open Stack for an Open Cloud Exchange(OCX)

We are developing a new public cloud, the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) based on the model of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX). We discuss in this paper the vision of an OCX and how we intend to realize it using the OpenStack open-source cloud platform in the MOC. A limited form of an OCX can be achieved today by layering new services on top of OpenStack. We have performed an analysis of OpenStack to determine the changes needed in order to fully realize the OCX model. We describe these proposed changes, which although significant and requiring broad community involvement will provide functionality of value to both existing single-provider clouds as well as future multi-provider ones

SEUSS: rapid serverless deployment using environment snapshots

Modern FaaS systems perform well in the case of repeat executions when function working sets stay small. However, these platforms are less effective when applied to more complex, large-scale and dynamic workloads. In this paper, we introduce SEUSS (serverless execution via unikernel snapshot stacks), a new system-level approach for rapidly deploying serverless functions. Through our approach, we demonstrate orders of magnitude improvements in function start times and cacheability, which improves common re-execution paths while also unlocking previously-unsupported large-scale bursty workloads.Published versio

Recursive Hardware-as-a-Service (rHaaS) and Fast Provisioning

Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is a new service being developed by the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) to allow physical servers to be allocated to clients in the same way that virtual servers are in existing IaaS clouds. This poster describes the new recursive HaaS project and the fast provisioning customization we are developing. Recursive HaaS allows a HaaS service to be layered on top of an existing one. It will allow testing of new features at performance and scale without affecting the production service. It will also allow clients to host their own HaaS on top of a base HaaS to provide, potentially customized, services to their users. An example customization we are developing is a fast provisioning service that can be used between tenants that have some degree of trust in each other. It will allow nodes to be moved between customers (and a service installed) in seconds, rather than the minutes required by base HaaS