AzureBOT: A Framework for Bag-of-Tasks Applications on the Azure Cloud Platform

Abstract

Windows Azure is an emerging cloud platform that provides application developers with APIs to write scientific and commercial applications. However, the steep learning curve to understand the unique architecture of the cloud platforms in general and continuously changing Azure APIs specifically, make it difficult for the application developers to write cloud based applications. During our extensive experience with Azure cloud platform over the past few years, we have identified the need of a framework to abstract the complexities of working with the Azure cloud platform. Such a framework is essential for adoption of cloud technologies. Therefore, we have created AzureBOT-a framework for the Azure cloud platform to write bag-of-tasks class of distributed applications. Azure provides a straightforward and general interface that permits developers to concentrate on their application logic rather than cloud interaction. While we have implemented AzureBOT on Azure cloud platform, our framework design is generic to most of the cloud platforms. In this paper, we present the detailed design of our framework's internal architecture, the APIs in brief, and the usability of our framework. We also discuss the implementation of two different applications and their scalability results over 100Azure worker processors.