Bridging the tenant-provider gap in networked cloud services

Abstract

The shared nature of the network in today's multi-tenant data centers implies that network performance for tenants can vary significantly. Network performance variability hurts application performance, which makes tenant costs unpredictable and causes provider revenue loss. To address these issues, we proposed to extend the interface tenant-provider to include tenant's network requirements. We designed two virtual network abstractions that capture the trade-off between tenant's expressiveness and provider's flexibility, providing performance isolation and predictability. Further, we investigated how to allow tenants to express high-level goals and automatically predict the resources needed to achieve them. Since multiple resource combinations may achieve the same goal, our system chooses the combination most suitable for the provider. This enables a departure from today's resource-based pricing to a novel job-based pricing model. In this talk, Dr. Paolo Costa will motivate this approach and illustrate the design of the associated system. he will also briefly discuss evaluation results, which show that these new abstractions, by bridging the tenant-provider gap, can enable a symbiotic tenant-provider relationship with significant benefits for both entities.