Spreading the Heat: Multi-cloud Controller for Failover and Cross-Site Offloading

摘要

Despite the ubiquitous adoption of cloud computing and a very rich set of services offered by cloud providers, current systems lack efficient and flexible mechanisms to collaborate among multiple cloud sites. In order to guarantee resource availability during peaks in demand and to fulfill service level objectives, cloud service providers cap resource allocations and as a consequence, face severe underutilization during nonpeak periods. In addition, application owners are forced to make independent contracts to deploy their application at different sites. To illustrate how these shortcomings can be overcome, we present a lightweight cross-site offloader for OpenStack. Our controller utilizes templates and site weights to enable offloading of virtual machines between geographically disperse sites. We present and implement a proposed architecture and demonstrate its feasibility in both a typical cross-site offloading, as well as a failover scenario.