Empowering Dynamic Task-Based Applications with Agile Virtual Infrastructure Programmability

The IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offered by Clouds provides applications with the capability of customizing VMs and configuring their network. Compared to traditional service-based IaaS applications such as persistent web services, most task-based applications have a relatively short duration but are triggered on demand. A typical way to support such kinds of application is to provision a shared and fixed virtual infrastructure based on pre-estimated size in advance, and then perform all the processing tasks. However, due to unpredictable workloads, this solution can lead to either cost inefficiency caused by over-provisioning, or failure to deliver the performance required by applications. CloudsStorm is a dynamic control framework proposed to provide applications with agile programmability and flexibility in controlling the virtual infrastructure. With its front end, applications can design their networked infrastructure and program that infrastructure with our interpreted infrastructure code language. With the back-end engine, the infrastructure code can be executed to provision the networked infrastructure, deploy and execute the application to obtain results, and release resources. Moreover, we adopt multi-threading to support parallel operation. Finally, we conduct experiments in an assumed scenario to demonstrate functionalities of CloudsStorm. The evaluation results prove CloudsStorm is efficient for task-based applications that need to exploit Clouds but reduce the monetary cost.