Managing clouds: a case for a fresh look at large unreliable dynamic networks

ABSTRACT

Peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols have proven efficient to provide scalable support to many large-scale distributed applications, successfully coping with unreliability and dynamics. However, to exploit them in a wider range of environments, such as very large-scale networks of smartphones or set-top boxes, it is imperative to make P2P protocols manageable: we need to be able to start, bootstrap and stop protocols, and assign resources dynamically. In this paper we present a general-purpose framework aimed to support several fully distributed applications running independently over a very large scale and dynamic pool of resources. We call this resource pool a cloud. The basic idea of the framework is a declarative application suit description, that describes what applications should be running on what resources, and a middleware that makes sure the currently available and dynamic cloud self-organizes into the configuration represented by the description, creating the subclouds that are assigned to applications. The middleware also provides additional functionality, such as bootstrapping overlay networks, to support the applications. Our preliminary ideas on the implementation rely on various gossip-based protocols, that are applied to form the subclouds and to implement bootstrapping, monitoring and control services. Most of all, this position paper sets an exciting research agenda to fully exploit the possibilities offered by very large scale dynamic networks.

REFERENCES

• 1: M. Jelasity and O. Babaoglu. T-Man: Gossip-based overlay topology management. In S. A. Brueckner, G. Di Marzo Serugendo, D. Hales, and F. Zambonelli, editors, Engineering Self-Organising Systems: Third International Workshop (ESOA 2005), Revised Selected Papers, volume 3910 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 1--15. Springer-Verlag, 2006.
• 2: Márk Jelasity , Rachid Guerraoui , Anne-Marie Kermarrec , Maarten van Steen, The peer sampling service: experimental evaluation of unstructured gossip-based implementations, Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IFIP/USENIX international conference on Middleware, October 18-22, 2004, Toronto, Canada
• 3: M. Jelasity and A.-M. Kermarrec. Ordered slicing of very large-scale overlay networks. In Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P 2006), 2006. to appear.
• 4: Márk Jelasity , Alberto Montresor , Ozalp Babaoglu, Gossip-based aggregation in large dynamic networks, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.23 n.3, p.219-252, August 2005 [doi>10.1145/1082469.1082470]
• 5: M. Jelasity, A. Montresor, and O. Babaoglu. The bootstrapping service. In Proceedins of the 26th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems: Workshops (ICDCS WORKSHOPS), 2006. International Workshop on Dynamic Distributed Systems (IWDDS), to appear.
• 6: Alberto Montresor , Mark Jelasity , Ozalp Babaoglu, Chord on Demand, Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P'05), p.87-94, August 31-September 02, 2005 [doi>10.1109/P2P.2005.4]
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.3 Network Operations

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Distributed networks
      C.2.2 Network Protocols
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Reliability, availability, and serviceability

General Terms:
Management