The rise of cloud computing systems

Abstract

In this talk I will describe the development of systems that underlie modern cloud computing systems. This development shares much of its motivation with the related fields of transaction processing systems and high performance computing, but because of scale, these systems tend to have more emphasis on fault tolerance using software techniques. Important developments in the development of modern cloud systems include very high performance distributed file system, such as the Google File System (Ghemawat et al., SOSP 2003), reliable computational frameworks such as MapReduce (Dean & Ghemawat, OSDI 2004) and Dryad (Isard et al., 2007), and large scale structured storage systems such as BigTable (Chang et al. 2006), Dynamo (DeCandia et al., 2007), and Spanner (Corbett et al., 2012). Scheduling computations can either be done using virtual machines (exemplified by VMWare's products), or as individual processes or containers. The development of public cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, allow external developers to utilize these large-scale services to build new and interesting services and products, benefiting from the economies of scale of large datacenters and the ability to grow and shrink computing resources on demand across millions of customers.