Enabling Cloud-Based Services: The Cloud Isnt Everywhere

We are currently in the midst of a revolution with regards to how applications are delivered to users. Instead of simply shipping binaries that users install on their devices, application providers are increasingly shifting to the model of offering software services. Google Docs, Instagram, Dropbox, and Words with Friends are popular examples of this paradigm shift. In all of these cases, the use of software services enables application providers to offload application functionality from resource-constrained client devices such as smartphones and tablets, offer a seamless user experience across multiple devices, and enable content sharing.

However, the software as a service application model requires application providers to incur additional costs associated with hosting and managing service deployments. Software services also implicitly threaten user privacy and are constrained by the Internet in terms of the performance and availability perceived by users. In this talk, I will describe the existing best practices to address these challenges, highlight the problems associated with these best practices, and present an overview of three systems that we have developed to address these problems: SPANStore, WhyHigh, and LASTor. I will also discuss some of my ongoing projects and future plans for research in this space.
Harsha V. Madhyastha is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at University of California Riverside. His research interests broadly span the areas of distributed systems, networking, and security and privacy. Many of the systems developed as part of his research have been widely used and have had significant impact. For example, WhyHigh has reduced latencies to Google by an order of magnitude for millions of users, the MyPageKeeper system for detecting social malware is in use by over 20,000 Facebook users, and Internet topology and performance data from the iPlane system has been used in research projects at over 100 institutions. His work has also resulted in award papers at the USENIX NSDI and ACM SIGCOMM IMC conferences. His research is supported by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Amazon, VMware, a Google Research award, a NetApp Faculty Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER award.