A Plan for Optimizing Network-Intensive Cloud Applications

Abstract

A significant and growing number of applications deployed on cloud infrastructures are network-intensive. These applications are frequently bottlenecked by the speed of network connections between the machines on which they are deployed. Due to the complexity and size of cloud networks, such applications often run slowly or have unpredictable completion times and/or throughput, both of which can result in increased cost to the customer. In this paper, we argue that cloud customers should be able to express the demands and objectives of their applications. We outline an architecture that allows for this type of expression, and distributes applications within the cloud network such that the application's objectives are met. We discuss some of the key questions that need to be addressed to implement the architecture, as well as the interactions between optimizations done by clients and by cloud providers. We also present preliminary results that indicate that these types of systems are feasible and improve performance.