STOIC: Streaming operating systems in the cloud

Abstract

As cloud computing continues to increase in performance, while simultaneously decreasing in cost, it comes as no surprise that traditional computing tasks are frequently being offloaded to cloud services. This paper presents STOIC, a service model for booting and streaming an operating system from public cloud infrastructure. Having booted with STOIC, users can perform regular activities with few noticeable differences between STOIC and more traditional methods of booting an OS. STOIC makes minimal assumptions about the hardware and software capabilities of the booting client and is compatible with many popular cloud storage providers. We show that STOIC's file streaming is responsive and demonstrate several use cases in which streaming an OS is beneficial when compared to alternative file distribution methods.