SGER: Service Paths -- Optimizing end-to-end Behaviors in Distributed Service Architectures

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Distributed applications and the hardware/software platforms on which they run are becoming increasingly complex. As a result, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to understand and then manage application behavior, particularly for applications that are critical to the ability of organizations to provide services for which they have contractual obligations. Georgia Tech's `Service Paths' project is developing technologies for (1) dynamically discovering the critical `paths' applications follow through distributed sets of services, and (2) managing such paths in order to improve an application's ability to meet dynamic service level agreements. Service path technologies will substantially improve systems' abilities to provide end-to-end guarantees and enhance the underlying systems' capabilities to provide such guarantees. Concrete outcomes include new system-level methods and abstractions to better understand current application behavior, new middleware abstractions suitable both for constructing and managing large-scale software overlays across many machines, and experimental results attained with virtualized platforms like PlanetLab and with novel hardware support for runtime platform virtualization. Broader significance: the costs of developing and changing modern IT infrastructures are now dominated by personnel rather than hardware. Technology providers have reacted to this fact by making it increasingly easy to develop complex distributed applications. Without also understanding and then being able to manage and control such applications, cost savings attained at development time cannot be translated to the continuing cost savings required to make U.S. industry competitive with low-cost, international providers.