FSaaS: File System as a Service

Abstract

Cloud-based object storage is provided as a cost-efficient, scalable, and durable service for accessing and storing objects through web technologies. With years of development and successful deployment, it has been widely adopted by individuals and organizations. Besides its advantages, there are several major concerns, such as, manageability, operation performance from a user perspective, convenience of access, and vendor lock-in. In this project, we have developed a File System as a Service (FSaaS) to address the aforementioned concerns. The FSaaS design is centred around separating file operations into groups and treating each operation group differently. We deal with the file system structures and attributes of objects in FSaaS, and leave the back-end storage as flat, and we provide a set of connector services that support various types of cloud storage for asynchronous operation mode. This separation of meta-data and use of connector services allow fast searching, transparent access, authentication simplification, concurrent operation, and load-balancing. The evaluation demonstrates that FSaaS can significantly improve user experience, boost operation performance, and reduce object operational delay. The scalability and flexibility of the FSaaS are also demonstrated via asynchronous operation mode.