Integrating Network Management for Cloud Computing Services

Abstract

Cloud computing is known to lower costs of corporate IT. Thus enterprises are eager to move IT applications into public or private cloud. Because of this trend, networks connecting enterprises and cloud providers now play a critical role in delivering high-quality cloud applications.

Simply buying better devices is not viable for improving network quality,

due to high capital costs. A more attractive approach is to better utilize network resources with proper network management. However, there are two problems with current network management: separately managing network components along the end-to-end path, and heavily relying on vendor-specific interfaces with devices.

This dissertation takes a practical approach driven by operational experiences of cloud services to tackle the two problems. With knowledge of real-world challenges, we have designed proper abstractions for low-level device interactions, and have built efficient and

scalable systems to integrate the management of various network components. With commercial deployment, our operational experiences feed back into revision of the abstraction and system design.

In this dissertation, we make three major contributions. We first propose to consolidate the traffic and infrastructure management in datacenters. Our system, called Statesman, simplifies management solutions by providing a uniform abstraction to interact with various aspects of devices. Statesman then allows multiple solutions to run together, resolves their conflicts, and prevents network-wide failures caused by their collective actions.

Statesman has been operational worldwide in Microsoft's public cloud offering since October 2013.

The second contribution consists of joining end hosts with networks for cooperative traffic management. Our Hone system brings in the fine-grained knowledge of cloud applications in the hosts, and offers an expressive programming framework with a uniform view of both host and network data. Hone has been integrated into Verizon Business Cloud.

The final contribution consists of bridging enterprises and Internet service providers (ISPs) for fine-grained control of inbound traffic from cloud applications. Our Sprite system enables enterprises to directly decide how traffic enters the enterprise networks via which ISPs, offering expressive interface and scalable execution. In collaboration with Princeton's Office of Information Technology, Sprite was tested with campus-network data and live Internet experiments.