We will be presenting two paper at the upcoming USENIX HotCloud 2020 workshop.
Title: Stratus: Clouds with Microarchitectural Resource Management
Authors: Kaveh Razavi* (ETH Zurich) and Animesh Trivedi* (VU Amsterdam)
* Equal contributions
Abstract: The emerging next generation of cloud services like Granular and Serverless computing are pushing the boundaries of the current cloud infrastructure. In order to meet the performance objectives, researchers are now leveraging low-level hardware microarchitectural resources in clouds. At the same time these resources are also a major source of security problems that can compromise the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data in multi-tenant shared cloud infrastructures. The core of the problem is the lack of isolation due to the unsupervised sharing of microarchitectural resources across different performance and security boundaries. In this paper, we introduce Stratus clouds that treat the isolation on microarchitectural elements as the key design principle when allocating cloud resources. This isolation improves both performance and security, but at the cost of reducing resource utilization. Stratus captures this trade-off using a novel abstraction that we call isolation credit, and show how it can help both providers and tenants when allocating microarchitectural resources using Stratus’s declarative interface. We conclude by discussing the challenges of realizing Stratus clouds today.
Link: HotCloud 2020
Title: Towards Supporting Millions of Users in Modifiable Virtual Environments by Redesigning Minecraft-Like Games as Serverless Systems
Authors: Jesse Donkervliet, Animesh Trivedi, Alexandru Iosup (VU Amsterdam)
Abstract: How can Minecraft-like games become scalable cloud services? Hundreds of Minecraft-like games, that is, games acting as modifiable virtual environments (MVEs), are currently played by over 100 million players, but surprisingly they do not scale and are frequently not published as cloud services. We envision a new architecture for large-scale MVEs, supporting much larger numbers of concurrent users by scaling up and out using serverless technology. In our vision, developers focus on the game (business) logic, while cloud providers manage resource management and scheduling (RMS) and guarantee non-functional properties. We provide a definition for MVEs, model their services and deployments, present a vision for large-scale MVEs architected as serverless systems, and suggest concrete steps towards realizing this vision.
Link: HotCloud 2020