I-Corps: AppScale -- Spurring Innovation Through Cloud Application Portability

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This work addresses what researchers believe are the key impediments to the adoption of cloud computing for scientific as well as commercial advance: portability and application development support for emerging and future cloud systems. The project plan proposes to explore the market viability of combining an open source cloud portability platform (one that executes applications over disparate cloud infrastructures without modification - individually or in concert (cloud hybrids)), with plug-in features that enable new capabilities not available today (cloud hot-swapping of applications, cloud application debugging, disaster/outage recover, large scale data analytics over application data, etc.). The approach enables developers to participate in cloud application life cycle, security, fault tolerance, and cost, simply and efficiently. The runtime support exploits how cloud systems are designed and implemented to automate placement and scheduling, to extract high performance, and to virtualize extant and future cloud services. Such virtualization will enable applications to be written against a single service application programming interface, implemented using multiple cloud fabrics, with high performance and scalability.If successful, this project has the potential for broad impact by facilitating easy and effective cloud application development by a vast and diverse user community. By employing an open source model, this offers the benefits of open source (marketing, collaboration, visibility, self-support, customer confidence building) and makes a software system freely available and therefore widely accessible. This system can thus be used, investigated, and extended in educational and low-income settings free of charge. This approach is also unique in that the goal is to provide a universal platform that levels the playing field across cloud vendors. Developers write programs that execute over the open source application platform, which in turn executes on a wide variety of proprietary public cloud systems - as well as local, private clusters. This application thus precludes lock-in by any single cloud vendor and enables customers to "test drive" public cloud offerings locally in a private setting prior to paying for their use.