Rob Gingell: An Infrastructure Platform for Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing Conference - Cloud Slam 2009.
Abstract. Cassatt Active Response (CAR) is a family of products that permit the pooling and dynamic configuration of processing, communication, and storage resources. Configurations are established to support the execution of multi-component applications, within and across data center and organizational boundaries and are automatically adjusted to meet service levels, respond to failures and changes in capacity, and to add and remove new services as needs change.

The discussion will both describe the system and its evolved requirements as well as experiences in applying it to a variety of environments. The discussion will focus on the "why" it does what it does in addition to the "how", both to motivate the approaches taken as well as convey attributes essential to any approach to cloud computing. The discussion should be useful to those contemplating trying to create or modify their datacenters and resources to become more fluid in response to the class of dynamic demands expected to be typical in cloud-like usages.

Significant aspects of CAR's design are the high degree of both resource and application heterogeniety and the systems network-centric, loosely-coupled management of the environments it constructs and maintains. The system supports most major hardware and system software families, a large variety of networking hardware, and popular storage offerings and is suitable for the variety of resources typical in many data centers. More importantly, the system supports a broadly heterogeneous notion of logical resources extending from physical entities through containers such as virtualized hardware, and abstract virtual machines such as operating system processes and interpreters such as the JVM and CLR, and virtualization technologies such as VMware, Xen, Parallels, and Solaris Containers.

The system provides a common and consistent model for the composition of stacks of software within "machines" and containers, and also among distributed such stacks and across data center and organization boundaries. Its augmented model of containers creates uniform points of reference and measures of resource consumption, capacity, and utilization efficiency which guide its execution and provide the basis for access control, billing, and capacity planning and management.

CAR can employ the resources of other pools as in external "cloud"-like offerings from Amazon, and can offer its capacity in return and is a tool that can be used to construct so-called "internal clouds" and to manage application deployments across resources in both internal and external cloud environments.

CAR does not directly provide an application environment, instead providing the infrastructure on which the wide and increasingly diverse collection of application frameworks can be supported. It provides the resource allocation, arbitration, and management functionality which is usually missing from such frameworks. It is a basis for supporting the emerging class of developers charged more with "deployment" than "coding", as applications continue their trend towards a greater population of common components distributed across a variety of services and environments.

Video of the session:

Assets:
http://www.cassatt.com/wp/Cloudlsam2009Slides.pdf