Leveraging collaborative content exchange for on-demand VM multi-deployments in IaaS clouds

Abstract

A critical feature of IaaS cloud computing is the ability to deploy, boot and terminate large groups of inter-dependent VMs very quickly, which enables users to efficiently exploit the on-demand nature and elasticity of clouds even for large-scale deployments. A common pattern in this context is multi-deployment, i.e., using the same VM image template to instantiate a large number of VMs in parallel. A difficult trade-off arises in this context: access the content of the template on-demand but slowly due to I/O bottlenecks or pre-broadcast the full contents of the template on the local storage of the hosting nodes to avoid such bottlenecks. Unlike previous approaches that are biased towards either of the extremes, we propose a scheme that augments on-demand access through a collaborative scheme in which the VMs aim to leverage the similarity of access pattern in order to anticipate future accesses and exchange chunks between themselves in an attempt to reduce contention to the remote storage where the VM image template is stored. Large scale experiments show improvements in read throughput between 30%-40% compared to on-demand access schemes that perform in isolation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.