Follow the Sun through the Clouds: Application Migration for Geographically Shifting Workloads

Abstract

Global cloud services have to respond to workloads that shift geographically as a function of time-of-day or in response to special events. While many such services have support for adding nodes in one region and removing nodes in another, we demonstrate that such mechanisms can lead to significant performance degradation. Yet other services do not support application-level migration at all. Live VM migration between availability zones or even across cloud providers would be ideal, but cloud providers do not support this flexible mechanism. This paper presents the Supercloud, a uniform cloud service that supports live VM migration between data centers of all major public cloud providers. The Supercloud also provides a scheduler that automatically determines when and where to move VMs for optimal performance. We demonstrate that live VM migration can support shifting workloads effectively, with low downtimes and transparently to both services and their clients. The Supercloud also addresses challenges for supporting cross-cloud storage and networking.