Towards User-Centric Cloud Computing
Amit Levy (Princeton)
Research Talk
Wednesday, January 11, 2023, 1:30 pm
Abstract
Cloud computing has been a boon for developers of networked applications.
Developers have access to powerful compute, networking and storage resources.
Developers benefit from the economies of scale of large multi-tenant services.
Developer's applications are isolated from each other. Developers, developers,
developers. But what about end-users?
Existing cloud platforms leave it to application developers to worry about
end-users. Developers are responsible for identifying end-users, enforcing
security policies on their data, interoperating with other applications those
users might use, and paying for resources the users consumes. This hurts both
end-users and developers.
End-users have to trust the developers of each application they use to define
and enforce reasonable security policies on their data, maintain applications
free of security bugs, and retain their data even if the application shuts down.
For developers of new or emerging applications, gaining user trust, forging
partnerships with established applications, and paying for cloud resources may
prove prohibitively cumbersome or expensive.
In this talk I'll present a vision of a cloud that is user-, rather than
developer-centric. Rather than isolating virtual machines and databases, a
user-centric cloud isolates data belonging to different users. Rather than
accounting for resources an application uses, it accounts for resources used on
behalf of a user. The result would provide much more flexibility and confidence
to end-users while making developing and deploying applications at the tail more
feasible. This is not an entirely new idea, but trends in both available
technology and application architectures make such a vision newly plausible. I
will present some preliminary work towards this vision, as well as the (large
number of) remaining open problems.