Performance Isolation in Shared Cloud-based Storage Systems

云计算为企业提供了一个令人兴奋的新机会，使其从构建和管理自己的计算基础设施中解放出来。计算和在线托管的业务需求可以通过简单地从云提供商购买资源来满足。然而，由于云提供商无法提供满足客户需求的性能保证，云采用率受到限制。这个问题的罪魁祸首也是云计算的核心原则：资源共享和超额订阅。云提供商在来自不同企业的多个云计算服务之间共享每个服务器的资源;这提高了资源利用率并降低了托管服务的成本。不幸的是，如果存在显著的资源争用，这种共享可能导致不一致和不可预测的性能。 该研究计划的目标是通过改善云中的性能隔离状态来促进云计算的增长。强大的性能隔离限制了服务操作对竞争相同资源的其他服务的影响，使云提供商能够提供一致和可预测的性能。过去的工作主要集中在使用虚拟化来提供从单个机器争用资源的服务之间的隔离。然而，通常是部署在数千台机器上的底层云存储系统的性能决定了基于云的服务的性能特征。该研究计划将通过以下方式解决云存储系统中的性能隔离问题：通过广泛的测量研究确定争用的根本原因，调查不同设计决策对性能和争用的影响，探索改进性能隔离的创新解决方案，以及设计和实现一个新的云存储系统，在服务之间提供强大的性能隔离。总的来说，通过改进性能隔离来解决云采用的关键障碍，这项工作可以对不断增长和仍然不稳定的云计算行业产生深远的影响。

Cloud computing represents an exciting new opportunity for businesses to free themselves from building and managing their own computing infrastructure. Business needs in computation and online hosting can be met by simply purchasing resources from Cloud providers. The rate of Cloud adoption, however, has been throttled by the inability of Cloud providers to offer performance guarantees that meet customer requirements. The culprits to this problem are also core tenets of Cloud computing: resource sharing and oversubscription. Cloud providers share each server's resources among multiple Cloud computing services from different businesses; this improves resource utilization and reduces the cost of hosting services. Unfortunately, such sharing can lead to inconsistent and unpredictable performance if there is significant resource contention. The goal of this research program is to facilitate the growth of Cloud computing by improving the state of performance isolation in the Cloud. Strong performance isolation that limits the impact of a service's action on other services competing for the same resources allows Cloud providers to provide consistent and predictable performance. Past work has focused on using virtualization to provide isolation between services contending for resources from a single machine. However, it is often the performance of the underlying Cloud storage systems deployed across thousands of machines that determines the performance characteristics of Cloud-based services. This research program will tackle the performance isolation problem in Cloud storage systems by: identifying the root causes of contention through extensive measurement studies, investigating the impact of different design decisions on performance and contention, exploring innovative solutions to improve performance isolation, and designing and implementing a new Cloud storage system that provides strong performance isolation between services. Overall, by addressing a critical barrier to Cloud adoption through improved performance isolation, this work can have a profound impact on the growing and still volatile Cloud computing industry.