Development ecosystem intended for engineers and researchers looking to invent, build, verify, evaluate, and release application-tailored storage systems faster and more reliably

Description du projet

Des systèmes de stockage d’applications fiables

Aujourd’hui, de plus en plus d’activités dépendent de l’Internet des objets. Alors que les applications sans état sont confrontées au niveau du réseau, les applications avec état nécessitent des systèmes de données en cluster pour gérer l’état de l’application. Malgré les recherches approfondies sur la sécurité des systèmes, la géo-évolutivité, l’efficacité énergétique et la fiabilité, peu de travaux ont été effectués sur la programmabilité des systèmes. Le projet Ether, financé par l’UE, propose un écosystème de développement open source qui sera proposé aux ingénieurs et aux chercheurs souhaitant inventer, démontrer et créer des systèmes de stockage adaptés aux demandes des applications individuelles. Le système comprendra une plateforme de stockage de données virtualisée, un cadre de virtualisation pour spécifier les flux de contrôle et un centre communautaire pour partager les plugins et les services.

Objectif

In an era that Internet of Things (IoT) applications are getting increasingly dynamic and mobile, the Achilles heel of such efforts remains the management of the application state (e.g. consistency, availability, performance, fault tolerance). For stateless applications, functionalities like load balancing (active-active), failover (active-passive), and job continuity (roaming) are easily addressable at the network level. For stateful applications though, the developers must provision a clustered data layer for managing the ever-growing collections of geographically spread data. This layer needs to provide geo-transparent data access, integrate well with the interplay of backend services, and be tailored (described by structure and purpose and expressed in functionality) to the specific application requirements.

Over the last few years, research efforts are mainly focused on security, privacy, confidentiality, energy efficiency, and reliability of storage systems. An important aspect that has not been thoroughly investigated yet is programmability. To keep pace with the increasing birthday of new application models it is essential to pass the technological barrier of 'programming storage systems' and enter the age of 'composing storage systems'. So far, no competent solution has been proposed either by industry or academia.

Herein, we propose an open-source development ecosystem intended for engineers and researchers looking to invent, build, verify, evaluate, and release storage systems, tailored on a per-application basis. The ecosystem, called Ether, consists of i) the virtualized storage platform for managing application state whose data are spread across heterogeneous services provided by third-party vendors ii) the virtualization framework for specifying the control flows and the data management of the platform, as hierarchies of virtual functions iii) and the community hub for sharing virtual functions, platform configurations, or best practises.