CAREER: Application-Agnostic, Distributed-Aware Cloud Platforms

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Cloud Computing has radically changed how businesses run their applications by allowing a huge number of computers to be economically shared by many different users. The applications running inside these cloud data centers are growing in size and complexity. Even a relatively straightforward web application is likely to be composed of multiple interacting service components such as a web server, a database, and a data cache. The result is a complicated distributed application that may exhibit performance bottlenecks or consistency requirements between components. Unfortunately, existing resource management and reliability tools consider these components individually, and are often unaware of the important relations between them. This work is predicated on the belief that future data centers must be application-agnostic, yet distributed-computing-aware. The goal of this research project is to enable cloud platforms to balance this trade-off, improving performance, reliability, and efficiency. Its contributions will be twofold: 1) tools for cloud providers to better understand the applications running on their infrastructure, and 2) new resource management and reliability algorithms that offer customers stronger guarantees. These will be achieved with application-agnostic solutions built into the virtualization layer, that are still capable of understanding the structure and dependencies of distributed applications. Broader Impact: This work will improve the efficiency and reliability of data centers running web applications used by millions of people daily. By attacking these challenges at the virtualization layer, we will provide flexible solutions fit for a wide variety of environments. The project also contains a significant educational component to enhance the understanding of cloud computing challenges for students at the high school through graduate levels.