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arXiv · 2006.07163

Nefele: Process Orchestration for the Cloud

Mina Sedaghat·Pontus Sköldström·Daniel Turull·Vinay Yadhav·Joacim Halén·Madhubala Ganesan·Amardeep Mehta·Wolfgang John
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Abstract

Virtualization, either at OS- or hardware level, plays an important role in cloud computing. It enables easier automation and faster deployment in distributed environments. While virtualized infrastructures provide a level of management flexibility, they lack practical abstraction of the distributed resources. A developer in such an environment still needs to deal with all the complications of building a distributed software system. Different orchestration systems are built to provide that abstraction; however, they do not solve the inherent challenges of distributed systems, such as synchronization issues or resilience to failures. This paper introduces Nefele, a decentralized process orchestration system that automatically deploys and manages individual processes, rather than containers/VMs, within a cluster. Nefele is inspired by the Single System Image (SSI) vision of mitigating the intricacies of remote execution, yet it maintains the flexibility and performance of virtualized infrastructures. Nefele offers a set of APIs for building cloud-native applications that lets the developer easily build, deploy, and scale applications in a cloud environment. We have implemented and deployed Nefele on a cluster in our datacenter and evaluated its performance. Our evaluations show that Nefele can effectively deploy, scale, and monitor processes across a distributed environment, while it incorporates essential primitives to build a distributed software system.

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Mina Sedaghat, Pontus Sköldström, Daniel Turull, Vinay Yadhav, Joacim Halén, Madhubala Ganesan, Amardeep Mehta, Wolfgang John. 2020-06-12. Nefele: Process Orchestration for the Cloud. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07163

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