Making Cloud Easy: Design Considerations and First Components of a Distributed Operating System for Cloud

Cloud offerings have over the years been transformed from bare-metal to virtual machines, to containers, and most recently to serverless functions. Each of these execution context abstractions has been accompanied by a new layer of centralized management, but these extra management layers have led to a confusing and fragile system, that wastes developer time on managing execution contexts with little contribution to the application. We argue that it is time to revisit ideas of Single System Image (SSI) concepts to simplify the management of cloud execution contexts. An SSI abstraction for Cloud provides easy and convenient developer access to resources without recourse to programming multiple levels of execution contexts. We propose a novel set of design principles inspired by earlier distributed operating system and SSI research. We also present a first corresponding service, realizing fully decentralized resource management, folding multiple layers of centralized management stacks into a single layer spanning across datacenter resources. As a result, developers never see individual execution environments, but deal with processes and IPC familiar from local development machines.