Turning down the LAMP: software specialisation for the cloud

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• Anil Madhavapeddy, University of Cambridge
• Tuesday 19 January 2010, 13:00-13:45
• Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, Room FW11.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Stephen Kell.

This is an informal talk about early work on the topic, not much slideware

The commoditisation of network-connected computing and storage into the cloud has fundamentally changed the economics of server hosting. Resources are now available on a highly dynamic basis, enabling both transient deployment for specific workloads, and optimisation of general applications to deal with the load spikes commonly seen by Internet services. Unfortunately today’s software stacks used to build these hosted applications have accreted layers of unnecessary complexity.

We propose throwing away much of this runtime legacy, including the operating system, and replacing it with simpler, specialised code generated from a statically type-safe language. The benefits are significant: cost-savings in a pay-as-you-go cloud platform, improved reliability and security, and a system that takes advantage of cloud-specific features such as migration and resource control. In this paper we describe MirageOS, the prototype platform we are building to achieve this using the Xen hypervisor and Objective Caml.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory NetOS Group Talklets series.

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