With the growing reliance on the ubiquitous availability of IT systems and services, these systems become more global, scaled, and complex to operate. To maintain business viability, IT service providers must put in place reliable and cost efficient operations support. Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) is a promising technology for alleviating operational complexity of IT systems and services. AIOps platforms utilize big data, machine learning and other advanced analytics technologies to enhance IT operations with proactive actionable dynamic insight.
In this paper we share our experience applying the AIOps approach to a production cloud object storage service to get actionable insights into system's behavior and health. We describe a real-life production cloud scale service and its operational data, present the AIOps platform we have created, and show how it has helped us resolving operational pain points.
This paper presents an approach for constructing distributed storage system based on micro-service architecture. By building storage functionalities using micro services, we can provide new capabilities to a distributed storage system in a flexible way. We take erasure coding and compression as two case studies to show how to build a micro-service based distributed storage system. We also show that by building erasure coding and compression as micro-services, the distributed storage system still achieves reasonable performance compared to the monolithic one.
Storage allocation affects important performance measures of distributed storage systems. Most previous studies on the storage allocation consider its effect separately either on the success of the data recovery or on the service rate (time) where it is assumed that no access failure happens in the system. In this paper, we go one step further and incorporate the access model and the success of data recovery into the service rate analysis. In particular, we focus on quasi-uniform storage allocation and provide a service rate analysis for both fixed-size and probabilistic access models at the n…
Enterprises are driving towards less cost, more availability, agility, managed risk - all of which is accelerated towards Cloud Computing. Cloud is not a particular product, but a way of delivering IT services that are consumable on demand, elastic to scale up and down as needed, and follow a pay-for-usage model. Out of the three common types of cloud computing service models, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a service model that provides servers, computing power, network bandwidth and Storage capacity, as a service to their subscribers. Cloud can relate to many things but without the fun…
Building AI Agents for Autonomous Clouds: Challenges and Design Principles
Microsoft（微软公司）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Indian Institue of Science（印度科学学院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Agnes Scott College（阿格尼斯斯科特学院）
Reliable storage emulations from fault-prone components have established themselves as an algorithmic foundation of modern storage services and applications. Most existing reliable storage emulations are built from storage services supporting arbitrary read-modify-write primitives. Since such primitives are not typically exposed by pre-existing or off-the-shelf components (such as cloud storage services or network-attached disks) it is natural to ask if they are indeed essential for efficient storage emulations. In this paper, we answer this question in the affirmative. We show that relaxing t…
Cloud computing provides scientists a platform that can deploy computation and data intensive applications without infrastructure investment. With excessive cloud resources and a decision support system, large generated data sets can be flexibly 1 stored locally in the current cloud, 2 deleted and regenerated whenever reused or 3 transferred to cheaper cloud service for storage. However, due to the pay for use model, the total application cost largely depends on the usage of computation, storage and bandwidth resources, hence cutting the cost of cloud based data storage becomes a big concern f…
Edge and fog computing have grown popular as IoT deployments become wide-spread. While application composition and scheduling on such resources are being explored, there exists a gap in a distributed data storage service on the edge and fog layer, instead depending solely on the cloud for data persistence. Such a service should reliably store and manage data on fog and edge devices, even in the presence of failures, and offer transparent discovery and access to data for use by edge computing applications. Here, we present Elfstore, a first-of-its-kind edge-local federated store for streams of …
The Globus Data Grid architecture provides a scalable infrastructure for the management of storage resources and data that are distributed across Grid environments. These services are designed to support a variety of scientific applications, ranging from high-energy physics to computational genomics, that require access to large amounts of data (terabytes or even petabytes) with varied quality of service requirements. By layering on a set of core services, such as data transport, security, and replica cataloging, one can construct various higher-level services. In this paper, we discuss the de…
Any information is valuable as long as it has related data. If related data are not put together, the information is meaningless as unrelated data has no value. The mapped information is required only by authenticated users. So there is no necessity to store related information together. If the relations of a database are fragmented into chunks and these chunks are stored at different cloud service providers, it could prevent from any privacy breach and the data stored will be secure. It would also reduce the data transfer costs as the entire data is not always required, for e.g. during update…
We describe the design and implementation of a high performance cloud that we have used to archive, analyze and mine large distributed data sets. By a cloud, we mean an infrastructure that provides resources and/or services over the Internet. A storage cloud provides storage services, while a compute cloud provides compute services. We describe the design of the Sector storage cloud and how it provides the storage services required by the Sphere compute cloud. We also describe the programming paradigm supported by the Sphere compute cloud. Sector and Sphere are designed for analyzing large dat…
The new era of computing called Cloud Computing allows the user to access the cloud services dynamically over the Internet wherever and whenever needed. Cloud consists of data and resources; and the cloud services include the delivery of software, infrastructure, applications, and storage over the Internet based on user demand through Internet. In short, cloud computing is a business and economic model allowing the users to utilize high-end computing and storage virtually with minimal infrastructure on their end. Cloud has three service models namely, Cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud …
The cost of Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) storage is the main concern preventing its adoption in practice. This cost stems from the need to maintain at least 3t+1 replicas in different storage servers in the asynchronous model, so that t Byzantine replica faults can be tolerated. In this paper, we present MDStore, the first fully asynchronous read/write BFT storage protocol that reduces the number of data replicas to as few as 2t+1, maintaining 3t+1 replicas of metadata at (possibly) different servers. At the heart of MDStore store is its metadata service that is built upon a new abstraction …
German-Russian Astroparticle Data Life Cycle Initiative is an international project whose aim is to develop a distributed data storage system that aggregates data from the storage systems of different astroparticle experiments. The prototype of such a system, which is called the Astroparticle Physics Distributed Data Storage (APPDS), has been being developed. In this paper, the Data Aggregation Service, one of the core services of APDDS, is presented. The Data Aggregation Service connects all distributed services of APPDS together to find the necessary data and deliver them to users on demand.
An increasing number of Analytics-as-a-Service solutions has recently seen the light, in the landscape of cloud-based services. These services allow flexible composition of compute and storage components, that create powerful data ingestion and processing pipelines. This work is a first attempt at an experimental evaluation of analytic application performance executed using a wide range of storage service configurations. We present an intuitive notion of data locality, that we use as a proxy to rank different service compositions in terms of expected performance. Through an empirical analysis,…
Allocation of (redundant) file chunks throughout a distributed storage system affects important performance metrics such as the probability of file recovery, data download time, or the service rate of the system under a given data access model. This paper is concerned with the service rate under the assumption that the stored data is large and its download time is not negligible. We focus on quasi-uniform storage allocations and provide a service rate analysis for two common data access models. We find that the optimal allocation varies in accordance with different system parameters. This was …
Atomicity or strong consistency is one of the fundamental, most intuitive, and hardest to provide primitives in distributed shared memory emulations. To ensure survivability, scalability, and availability of a storage service in the presence of failures, traditional approaches for atomic memory emulation, in message passing environments, replicate the objects across multiple servers. Compared to replication based algorithms, erasure code-based atomic memory algorithms has much lower storage and communication costs, but usually, they are harder to design. The difficulty of designing atomic memo…
Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）
Distributed data storage services tailored to specific applications have grown popular in the high-performance computing (HPC) community as a way to address I/O and storage challenges. These services offer a variety of specific interfaces, semantics, and data representations. They also expose many tuning parameters, making it difficult for their users to find the best configuration for a given workload and platform. To address this issue, we develop a novel variational-autoencoder-guided asynchronous Bayesian optimization method to tune HPC storage service parameters. Our approach uses transfe…
Modern distributed storage systems often use erasure codes to protect against disk and node failures to increase reliability, while trying to meet the latency requirements of the applications and clients. Storage systems may have caches at the proxy or client ends in order to reduce the latency. In this paper, we consider a novel caching framework with erasure code called functional caching. Functional Caching involves using erasure-coded chunks in the cache such that the code formed by the chunks in storage nodes and cache combined are maximal-distance-separable (MDS) erasure codes. Based on …
Redundant storage maintains the performance of distributed systems under various forms of uncertainty. This paper considers the uncertainty in node access and download service. We consider two access models under two download service models. In one access model, a user can access each node with a fixed probability, and in the other, a user can access a random fixed-size subset of nodes. We consider two download service models. In the first (small file) model, the randomness associated with the file size is negligible. In the second (large file) model, randomness is associated with both the fil…
Big data storage management is one of the most challenging issues for Grid computing environments, since large amount of data intensive applications frequently involve a high degree of data access locality. Grid applications typically deal with large amounts of data. In traditional approaches high-performance computing consists dedicated servers that are used to data storage and data replication. In this paper we present a new mechanism for distributed and big data storage and resource discovery services. Here we proposed an architecture named Dynamic and Scalable Storage Management (DSSM) arc…
In today's enterprise storage systems, supported data services such as snapshot delete or drive rebuild can cause tremendous performance interference if executed inline along with heavy foreground IO, often leading to missing SLOs (Service Level Objectives). Typical storage system applications such as web or VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) follow a repetitive high/low workload pattern that can be learned and forecasted. We propose a priority-based background scheduler that learns this repetitive pattern and allows storage systems to maintain peak performance and in turn meet service level…
Cloud storage systems have been introduced to provide a scalable, secure, reliable, and highly available data storage environment for the organizations and end-users. Therefore, the service provider should grow in a geographical extent. Consequently, extensive storage service provision requires a replication mechanism. Replication imposes many costs on the cloud storage, including the synchronization, communications, storage, etc., costs among the replicas. Moreover, the synchronization process among replicas is a major challenge in cloud storage. Therefore, consistency can be defined as the c…
Modern science and engineering computing environments often feature storage systems of different types, from parallel file systems in high-performance computing centers to object stores operated by cloud providers. To enable easy, reliable, secure, and performant data exchange among these different systems, we propose Connector, a pluggable data access architecture for diverse, distributed storage. By abstracting low-level storage system details, this abstraction permits a managed data transfer service (Globus in our case) to interact with a large and easily extended set of storage systems. Eq…
The ability to store multiple versions of a data item is a powerful primitive that has had a wide variety of uses: relational databases, transactional memory, version control systems, to name a few. However, each implementation uses a very particular form of versioning that is customized to the domain in question and hidden away from the user. In our going project, we are reviewing and analyzing multiple uses of versioning in distinct domains, with the goal of identifying the basic components required to provide a generic distributed multiversioning object storage service, and define how these…
Eliminating duplicate data in primary storage of clouds increases the cost-efficiency of cloud service providers as well as reduces the cost of users for using cloud services. Existing primary deduplication techniques either use inline caching to exploit locality in primary workloads or use post-processing deduplication running in system idle time to avoid the negative impact on I/O performance. However, neither of them works well in the cloud servers running multiple services or applications for the following two reasons: Firstly, the temporal locality of duplicate data writes may not exist i…
The compass of Cloud infrastructure services advances steadily leaving users in the agony of choice. To be able to select the best mix of service offering from an abundance of possibilities, users must consider complex dependencies and heterogeneous sets of criteria. Therefore, we present a PhD thesis proposal on investigating an intelligent decision support system for selecting Cloud based infrastructure services (e.g. storage, network, CPU).
Today's cloud storage services must offer storage reliability and fast data retrieval for large amount of data without sacrificing storage cost. We present SEARS, a cloud-based storage system which integrates erasure coding and data deduplication to support efficient and reliable data storage with fast user response time. With proper association of data to storage server clusters, SEARS provides flexible mixing of different configurations, suitable for real-time and archival applications. Our prototype implementation of SEARS over Amazon EC2 shows that it outperforms existing storage systems i…
Cloud object storage such as AWS S3 is cost-effective and highly elastic but relatively slow, while high-performance cloud storage such as AWS ElastiCache is expensive and provides limited elasticity. We present a new cloud storage service called ServerlessMemory, which stores data using the memory of serverless functions. ServerlessMemory employs a sliding-window-based memory management strategy inspired by the garbage collection mechanisms used in the programming language to effectively segregate hot/cold data and provides fine-grained elasticity, good performance, and a pay-per-access cost …
Science gateways are user-centric, end-to-end cyberinfrastructure for managing scientific data and executions of computational software on distributed resources. In order to simplify the creation and management of science gateways, we have pursued a multi-tenanted, platform-as-a-service approach that allows multiple gateway front-ends (portals) to be integrated with a consolidated middleware that manages the movement of data and the execution of workflows on multiple back-end scientific computing resources. An important challenge for this approach is to provide an end-to-end data movement and …
With the growth in popularity of cloud computing, object storage systems (e.g., Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift, Ceph) have gained momentum for their relatively low per-GB costs and high availability. However, as increasingly more sensitive data is being accrued, the need to natively integrate privacy controls into the storage is growing in relevance. Today, due to the poor object storage interface, privacy controls are enforced by data curators with full access to data in the clear. This motivates the need for a new approach to data privacy that can provide strong assurance and control to data own…
The Internet stack is not a complete description of the resources and services needed to implement distributed applications, as it only accounts for communication services and the protocols that are defined to deliver them. This paper presents an account of the current distributed application architecture using a formal model of strictly layered systems, meaning that services in any layer can only depend on services in the layer immediately below it. By mapping a more complete Internet-based application stack that includes necessary storage and processing resources to this formal model, we are…
Service Level Agreements (SLA) are employed to ensure the performance of Cloud solutions. When a component fails, the importance of logs increases significantly. All departments may turn to logs to determine the cause of the issue and find the party at fault. The party at fault may be motivated to tamper with the logs to hide their role. We argue that the critical nature of Cloud logs calls for immutability and verification mechanism without the presence of a single trusted party. This paper proposes such a mechanism by describing a blockchain-based log storage system, called Logchain, which c…
We report the design, implementation, and deployment of Lepton, a fault-tolerant system that losslessly compresses JPEG images to 77% of their original size on average. Lepton replaces the lowest layer of baseline JPEG compression-a Huffman code-with a parallelized arithmetic code, so that the exact bytes of the original JPEG file can be recovered quickly. Lepton matches the compression efficiency of the best prior work, while decoding more than nine times faster and in a streaming manner. Lepton has been released as open-source software and has been deployed for a year on the Dropbox file-sto…
Hyper-converged cloud refers to an architecture that an operator runs compute and storage services on the same set of physical servers. Although the hyper-converged design comes with a number of benefits, it makes crucial operational tasks, such as capacity planning and cost analysis, fairly complicated. The problem becomes more onerous if we consider a complex distributed system, such as Ceph, for the cloud with the proliferation of SSD drives. In this paper, we aim to answer some of these questions based on comprehensive microbenchmarks, and consequently better understand the behavior of Cep…
A single vendor cannot provide complete IIoT end-to-end solutions because cooperation is required from multiple parties. Interoperability is a key architectural quality. Composability of capabilities, information and configuration is the prerequisite for interoperability, supported by a data storage infrastructure and defined set of interfaces to build applications. Secure collection, transport and storage of data and algorithms are expectations for collaborative participation in any IIoT solution. Participants require control of their data ownership and confidentiality. We propose an Internet…
Cloud services have turned remote computation into a commodity and enable convenient online collaboration. However, they require that clients fully trust the service provider in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Towards reducing this dependency, this paper introduces a protocol for verification of integrity and consistency for cloud object storage (VICOS), which enables a group of mutually trusting clients to detect data-integrity and consistency violations for a cloud object-storage service. It aims at services where multiple clients cooperate on data stored remotely on a…
Data deduplication is able to effectively identify and eliminate redundant data and only maintain a single copy of files and chunks. Hence, it is widely used in cloud storage systems to save storage space and network bandwidth. However, the occurrence of deduplication can be easily identified by monitoring and analyzing network traffic, which leads to the risk of user privacy leakage. The attacker can carry out a very dangerous side channel attack, i.e., learn-the-remaining-information (LRI) attack, to reveal users' privacy information by exploiting the side channel of network traffic in dedup…
Scientific discovery is increasingly dependent on a scientist's ability to acquire, curate, integrate, analyze, and share large and diverse collections of data. While the details vary from domain to domain, these data often consist of diverse digital assets (e.g. image files, sequence data, or simulation outputs) that are organized with complex relationships and context which may evolve over the course of an investigation. In addition, discovery is often collaborative, such that sharing of the data and its organizational context is highly desirable. Common systems for managing file or asset me…
Cloud computing has been envisioned as the next generation architecture of IT Enterprise. Using Cloud Storage,users can remotely store their data and enjoy the on demand high quality applications and services from a shared pool of configurable computing resources, without the burden local copy data storage and maintenance. It moves the application of software data stored to the centralized large data centers, where the management of the data stored services may not be completely trusted. There are many new security challenges and the problems taken into account for ensuring the integrity of da…
As the amount of scientific data continues to grow at ever faster rates, the research community is increasingly in need of flexible computational infrastructure that can support the entirety of the data science lifecycle, including long-term data storage, data exploration and discovery services, and compute capabilities to support data analysis and re-analysis, as new data are added and as scientific pipelines are refined. We describe our experience developing data commons-- interoperable infrastructure that co-locates data, storage, and compute with common analysis tools--and present several …
In this paper, we investigate the effect of incorrect disk replacement service on the availability of data storage systems. To this end, we first conduct Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the availability of disk subsystem by considering disk failures and incorrect disk replacement service. We also propose a Markov model that corroborates the Monte Carlo simulation results. We further extend the proposed model to consider the effect of automatic disk fail-over policy. The results obtained by the proposed model show that overlooking the impact of incorrect disk replacement can result up to th…
In the immediate future holographic technology will be available to store a very large amount of data in HVD (Holographic Versatile Disk) devices. This technology make extensive use of the WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) paradigm: this means that such devices allow for a simultaneous and parallel reading of millions of volumetric pixels (i.e. voxels). This characteristic will make accessible wherever the acquired data from a telescope (or satellite) in a quite-simultaneous way. With the support of this new technology the aim of this paper is to identify the guidelines for the implementation of a d…
Byzantine fault-tolerant systems have been researched for more than four decades, and although shown possible early, the solutions were impractical for a long time. With PBFT the first practical solution was proposed in 1999 and spawned new research which culminated in novel applications using it today. Although the safety and liveness properties of PBFT-type protocols have been rigorously analyzed, when it comes to practical performance only empirical results - often in artificial settings - are known and imperfections on the communication channels are not specifically considered. In this wor…
The traditional architecture for a DBMS engine has the recovery, concurrency control and access method code tightly bound together in a storage engine for records. We propose a different approach, where the storage engine is factored into two layers (each of which might have multiple heterogeneous instances). A Transactional Component (TC) works at a logical level only: it knows about transactions and their "logical" concurrency control and undo/redo recovery, but it does not know about page layout, B-trees etc. A Data Component (DC) knows about the physical storage structure. It supports a re…
The workloads running in the modern data centers of large scale Internet service providers (such as Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) support billions of users and span globally distributed infrastructure. Yet, the devices used in modern data centers fail due to a variety of causes, from faulty components to bugs to misconfiguration. Faulty devices make operating large scale data centers challenging because the workloads running in modern data centers consist of interdependent programs distributed across many servers, so failures that are isolated to a single device can still hav…
In cloud storage, the digital data is stored in logical storage pools, backed by heterogeneous physical storage media and computing infrastructure that are managed by a Cloud Service Provider (CSP). To balance the tradeoff between service performance and cost, CSPs often employ different storage tiers, for instance, cold storage and hot storage. Storing data in hot storage incurs high storage cost yet delivers low access latency, whereas cold storage is able to inexpensively store massive amounts of data and thus provides lower cost with higher latency. In this paper, we address a major challe…
In cloud data center, shared storage with good management is a main structure used for the storage of virtual machines (VM). In this paper, we proposed Hybrid VM storage (HVSTO), a privacy preserving shared storage system designed for the virtual machine storage in large-scale cloud data center. Unlike traditional shared storage, HVSTO adopts a distributed structure to preserve privacy of virtual machines, which are a threat in traditional centralized structure. To improve the performance of I/O latency in this distributed structure, we use a hybrid system to combine solid state disk and distr…
Modern distributed storage systems offer large capacity to satisfy the exponentially increasing need of storage space. They often use erasure codes to protect against disk and node failures to increase reliability, while trying to meet the latency requirements of the applications and clients. This paper provides an insightful upper bound on the average service delay of such erasure-coded storage with arbitrary service time distribution and consisting of multiple heterogeneous files. Not only does the result supersede known delay bounds that only work for a single file or homogeneous files, it …
Blockchain technology has gained increasing popularity in the research of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in the past decade. As a distributed and immutable ledger secured by strong cryptography algorithms, the blockchain brings a new perspective to secure IoT systems. Many studies have been devoted to integrating blockchain into IoT device management, access control, data integrity, security, and privacy. In comparison, the blockchain-facilitated IoT communication is much less studied. Nonetheless, we see the potential of blockchain in decentralizing and securing IoT communications. This pap…
With the evolution of computer systems, the amount of sensitive data to be stored as well as the number of threats on these data grow up, making the data confidentiality increasingly important to computer users. Currently, with devices always connected to the Internet, the use of cloud data storage services has become practical and common, allowing quick access to such data wherever the user is. Such practicality brings with it a concern, precisely the confidentiality of the data which is delivered to third parties for storage. In the home environment, disk encryption tools have gained special…
The fast developing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies provide a promising opportunity to build large-scale systems to connect numerous heterogeneous devices into the Internet. Most existing IIoT infrastructures are based on a centralized architecture, which is easier for management but cannot effectively support immutable and verifiable services among multiple parties. Blockchain technology provides many desired features for large-scale IIoT infrastructures, such as decentralization, trustworthiness, trackability, and immutability. This paper presents a blockchain-based IIoT ar…
The expansion of the Internet of Things(IoT) services and a huge amount of data generated by different sensors, signify the importance of cloud computing services like Storage as a Service more than ever. IoT traffic imposes such extra constraints on the cloud storage service as sensor data preprocessing capability and load-balancing between data centers and servers in each data center. Also, it should be allegiant to the Quality of Service (QoS). The hybrid MWG algorithm has been proposed in this work, which considers different objectives such as energy, processing time, transmission time, an…
In cloud storage systems with a large number of servers, files are typically not stored in single servers. Instead, they are split, replicated (to ensure reliability in case of server malfunction) and stored in different servers. We analyze the mean latency of such a split-and-replicate cloud storage system under general sub-exponential service time. We present a novel scheduling scheme that utilizes the load-balancing policy of the \textit{power of $d$ $(\geq 2)$} choices. An alternative to split-and-replicate is to use erasure-codes, and recently, it has been observed that they can reduce la…
Increasing amounts of data from varied sources, particularly in the fields of machine learning and graph analytics, are causing storage requirements to grow rapidly. A variety of technologies exist for storing and sharing these data, ranging from parallel file systems used by supercomputers to distributed block storage systems found in clouds. Relatively few comparative measurements exist to inform decisions about which storage systems are best suited for particular tasks. This work provides these measurements for two of the most popular storage technologies: Lustre and Amazon S3. Lustre is an…
