Elastic Scalable Cloud Computing Using Application-Level Migration

The authors present the Cloud Operating System (COS), a middleware framework to support autonomous workload elasticity and scalability based on application-level migration as a reconfiguration strategy. While other scalable frameworks (e.g., MapReduce or Google App Engine) force application developers to write programs following specific APIs, COS provides scalability in a general-purpose programming framework based on an actor-oriented programming language. When all executing VMs are highly utilized, COS scales a workload up by migrating mobile actors over to newly dynamically created VMs. When VM utilization drops, COS scales the workload down by consolidating actors and terminating idle VMs.