A Cloud Operating System
Toward a Cloud Operating System
Fabio Pianese
Peter Bosch
Alessandro Duminuco
Nico Janssens
†
Thanos Stathopoulos
Moritz Steiner
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs
Service Infrastructure Research Dept. †Computer Systems and Security Dept.
{firstname.lastname}@alcatel-lucent.com
Abstract—Cloud computing is characterized today by a hotchpotch of elements and solutions, namely operating systems running on a single virtualized computing environment, middleware layers that attempt to combine physical and virtualized resources from multiple operating systems, and specialized application engines that leverage a key asset of the cloud service provider (e.g.
Google’s BigTable). Yet, there does not exist a virtual distributed operating system that ties together these cloud resources into a unified processing environment that is easy to program, flexible, scalable, self-managed, and dependable.
In this position paper, we advocate the importance of a virtual distributed operating system, a Cloud OS, as a catalyst in unlocking the real potential of the Cloud—a computing platform with seemingly infinite CPU, memory, storage and network resources.
Following established Operating Systems and Distributed Systems principles laid out by UNIX and subsequent research efforts, the Cloud OS aims to provide simple programming abstractions to available cloud resources, strong isolation techniques between
Cloud processes, and strong integration with network resources.
At the same time, our Cloud OS design is tailored to the challenging environment of the Cloud by emphasizing elasticity, autonomous decentralized management, and fault tolerance.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The computing industry is radically changing the scale of its operations. While a few years ago typical deployed systems consisted of individual racks filled with few tens of computers, today’s massive computing infrastructures are composed of multiple server farms, each built inside carefully
Fabio Pianese
Peter Bosch
Alessandro Duminuco
Nico Janssens
†
Thanos Stathopoulos
Moritz Steiner
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs
Service Infrastructure Research Dept. †Computer Systems and Security Dept.
{firstname.lastname}@alcatel-lucent.com
Abstract—Cloud computing is characterized today by a hotchpotch of elements and solutions, namely operating systems running on a single virtualized computing environment, middleware layers that attempt to combine physical and virtualized resources from multiple operating systems, and specialized application engines that leverage a key asset of the cloud service provider (e.g.
Google’s BigTable). Yet, there does not exist a virtual distributed operating system that ties together these cloud resources into a unified processing environment that is easy to program, flexible, scalable, self-managed, and dependable.
In this position paper, we advocate the importance of a virtual distributed operating system, a Cloud OS, as a catalyst in unlocking the real potential of the Cloud—a computing platform with seemingly infinite CPU, memory, storage and network resources.
Following established Operating Systems and Distributed Systems principles laid out by UNIX and subsequent research efforts, the Cloud OS aims to provide simple programming abstractions to available cloud resources, strong isolation techniques between
Cloud processes, and strong integration with network resources.
At the same time, our Cloud OS design is tailored to the challenging environment of the Cloud by emphasizing elasticity, autonomous decentralized management, and fault tolerance.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The computing industry is radically changing the scale of its operations. While a few years ago typical deployed systems consisted of individual racks filled with few tens of computers, today’s massive computing infrastructures are composed of multiple server farms, each built inside carefully