AHAFS subsystem for enhancing operating system health in the cloud computing era

Abstract

Cloud computing is becoming an important paradigm for information technology (IT) infrastructures. A key advantage of cloud computing is its ability to decrease the cost of computing for a variety of applications. For the infrastructure layer, which includes servers and operating systems (OSs), cost reduction is achieved through the consolidation of many OS instances onto a single physical server and through significant improvements in system-administrator productivity. However, these productivity improvements require a scalable easy-to-use OS event-management subsystem so that the higher level software can reliably and effectively automate operations. This paper presents the design and implementation of an OS event-monitoring subsystem called Autonomic Health Advisor FileSystem (AHAFS) that is scalable, has little system-performance overhead, and provides instantaneous event notifications with useful information, for improving the robustness, security, and performance of an OS instance. AHAFS is extensible and can monitor various events for a wide variety of event consumers. AHAFS does not require the use of a new application programming interface (API) but uses the ubiquitous filesystem API; hence, AHAFS is usable by monitoring applications written in any of the languages commonly used for monitoring (e.g., C, C++, Perl® <trademarkname xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> **Trademark, service mark, or registered trademark of The Open Group, Silicon Graphics International, Sun Microsystems, Linus Torvalds, The Perl Foundation, or Python Software Foundation in the United States, other countries, or both.</trademarkname> , and Java® <trademarkname xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">**Trademark, service mark, or registered trademark of The Open Group, Silicon Graphics, Inc., Sun Microsystems, Linus Torvalds, The Perl Foundation, or Python Software Foundation in the United States, other countries, or both.</trademarkname> ) without requiring additional runtime modules or packages.