Implementing and operating an internet scale distributed application using service oriented architecture principles and cloud computing infrastructure

ABSTRACT

This paper describes our experiences implementing and operating a globally distributed application composed of services available on a Cloud Computing infrastructure. Intel needed a service that could give us an idea of end users' experiences with Intel Corporation's website from different regions of the globe. We built our monitoring system on top of the PlanetLab distributed systems testbed. Our first implementation relied on static configurations and needed manual intervention to respond to network and node outages. PlanetLab has Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture features that enabled us to increase our application's robustness by using web services for Virtual Machine (VM) allocation, VM provisioning, resource availability, and geographic information. We found that we had to treat service provided resource information like network equipment treats network information. Despite the lack of service level guarantees for PlanetLab VMs and Internet connectivity, we constructed a robust global monitoring service that is used by Intel network personnel today.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

General Terms:
Experimentation, Management, Measurement, Reliability

Keywords:
cloud computing, distributed systems, internet scale, monitoring, service-oriented architecture, web services