KalpaVriksh: Efficient and Cost-effective GUI Application Hosting using Singleton Snapshots

Abstract

Hosting popular GUI applications in different virtual machines (VMs) in a cloud can provide strong intra- application isolation and enhance the security of end-user devices. In this context, micro-VMs can be a very good fit where different applications are hosted in different micro-VMs hosted in the cloud. However, one of the challenges for the cloud service provider is to launch the application quickly when requested by any client. Techniques like VM snapshots can be used to improve the application launch time as shown in many existing research works. In this paper, we argue that GUI applications are different from snapshot-optimized cloud services like FaaS because the GUI applications are stateful and require specialized techniques for snapshot management. To manage application snapshots in a memory-efficient manner, the proposed KalpaVriksh framework maintains a single snapshot to launch multiple GUI applications from different end users. Furthermore, the unified snapshot framework does not impact the application launch time by using intelligent snapshot creation procedures. The experimental analysis shows that KalpaVriksh snapshot techniques apart from being memory- efficient, reach the farthest feasible point of snapshot capture (i.e., first external communication) during application execution, faster than a normal application launch (by 4.9x).