Section: Overall Objectives

Toward a STACK for Geo-Distributed Infrastructures

With the advent of Cloud Computing, modern applications have been developed on top of advanced software stacks composed of low-level system mechanisms, advanced middleware and software abstractions. While each of these layers has been designed to enable developers to efficiently use ICT resources without dealing with the burden of the underlying infrastructure aspects, the complexity of the resulting software stack has become a key challenge. As an example, Map/Reduce frameworks such as Hadoop have been developed to benefit from cpu/storage capacities of distinct servers. Running such frameworks on top of a virtualized cluster (i.e., in a Cloud) can lead to critical situations if the resource management system decides to consolidate all the VMs on the same physical machine  [105]. In other words, self-management decisions taken in isolation at one level (infrastructure, middleware, or application) may indirectly interfere with the decision taken by another layer, and globally affect the performance of the whole stack. Considering that geo-distributed ICT infrastructures significantly differ from the Cloud Computing ones regarding heterogeneity, resiliency, and the potential massive distribution of resources and networking environments  [67], [100], we can expect that the complexity of the software stacks is going to increase. Such an assumption can be illustrated, for instance, by the sotfware architecture proposed in 2016 by the ETSI Mobile edge computing Industry Specification Group  [92]. This architecture is structured around a new layer in charge of orchestrating distinct independent cloud systems, a.k.a. Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIMs) in their terminology. By reusing VIMs, ETSI targets an edge computing resource management that behaves in the same fashion as Cloud Computing ones. While mitigating development requirements, such a proposal hides all management decisions that might be taken in the VIM of one particular site and thus may lead to conflicting decisions and consequently to non-desired states overall.

Through the STACK team, we propose to investigate the sotfware stack challenge as a whole. We claim it is the only way to limit as much as possible the complexity of the next generation software stack of geo-distributed ICT infrastructures. To reach our goal, we will identify major building blocks that should compose such a software stack, how they should be designed (i.e., from the internal algorithms to the APIs they should expose), and finally how they should interact with each other.

Delivering such a software stack is an ambitious objective that goes beyond the activities of one research group. However, our expertise, our involvements in different consortiums (such as OpenStack) as well as our participation to different collaborative projects enable STACK members to contribute to this challenge in terms of architecture models, distributed system mechanisms and software artefacts, and finally, guideline reports on opportunities and constraints of geo-distributed ICT infrastructures.