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Overall objectives

General Objectives

Myriads is a joint team with Inria, CNRS, University Rennes 1, Insa Rennes and Ens Rennes. It is part of Irisa (D1 department on large scale systems) and Inria Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique.

The objective of Myriads is to design and implement systems for autonomous service and resource management in interconnected and distributed clouds. The team tackles the challenges of dependable application execution and efficient resource management in highly distributed clouds.

Context

The Myriads team research activities are conducted in the context of the future of Internet.

  • Myriads of applications are provided to more than one billion users 1 all over the world. Over time, these applications are becoming more and more sophisticated, a given application being a composition of services likely to be executed on various sites located in different geographical locations. The Internet of Services is spreading all domains: home, administration, business, industry and science. Everyone is involved in the Internet of Services: citizens, enterprises, scientists are application, service and resource consumers and/or providers over the Internet.

  • Software is provided as a service over the Internet. Myriads of applications are available on-line to billions of users as, for instance, GoogleApps (Gmail). After decades in which companies used to host their entire IT infrastructures in-house, a major shift is occurring where these infrastructures are outsourced to external operators such as Data Centers and Computing Clouds. In the Internet of Services, not only software but also infrastructure are delivered as a service. Clouds turned computing and storage into a utility. Just like water or electricity, they are available in virtually infinite amounts and their consumption can be adapted within seconds like opening or closing a water tap. The main transition, however, is the change in business models. Companies or scientists do not need to buy and operate their own data centers anymore. Instead, the compute and storage resources are offered by companies on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. There is no more need for large hardware investments before starting a business. Even more, the new model allows users to adapt their resources within minutes, e.g., scale up to handle peak loads or rent large numbers of computers for a short experiment. The risk of wasting money by either under-utilization or undersized data centers is shifted from the user to the provider.

  • Sharing information and cooperating over the Internet are also important user needs both in the private and the professional spheres. This is exemplified by various services that have been developed in the last decade. Peer-to-peer networks are extensively used by citizens in order to share musics and movies. A service like Flickr allowing individuals to share pictures is also very popular. Social networks such as FaceBook or Linkedln link millions of users who share various kinds of information within communities. Virtual organizations tightly connected to Grids allow scientists to share computing resources aggregated from different institutions (universities, computing centers…). The EGEE European Grid is an example of production Grid shared by thousands of scientists all over Europe.

    • Challenges

    The term cloud was coined 18 years ago. Today cloud computing is widely adopted for a wide range of usage: information systems outsourcing, web service hosting, scientific computing, data analytics, back-end of mobile and IoT applications. There is a wide variety of cloud service providers (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) resulting in difficulties for customers to select the services fitting their needs. Production clouds are powered by huge data centers that customers reach through the Internet. This current model raises a number of issues. Cloud computing generates a lot of traffic resulting in ISP providers needing to increase the network capacity. An increasing amount of always larger data centers consumes a lot of energy. Cloud customers experience poor quality of experience for highly interactive mobile applications as their requests are dealt with in data centers that are several hops away. The centralization of data in clouds also raises (i) security issues as clouds are a target of choice for attackers and (ii) privacy issues with data aggregation.

    Recently new cloud architectures have been proposed to overcome the scalability, latency, and energy issues of traditional centralized data centers. Various flavors of distributed cloud computing are emerging depending on the resources exploited: resources in the core network (distributed cloud), resources at the edge of the network (edge clouds) and even resources in the swarms of people’s devices (fog computing) enabling scalable cloud computing. These distributed clouds raise new challenges for resource and application management.

    The ultimate goal of the Myriads team is making highly distributed clouds sustainable. By sustainability we mean green, efficient and secure clouds. We plan to study highly distributed clouds including edge clouds and fog computing. In this context, we will investigate novel techniques for greening clouds including the optimization of energy consumption in distributed clouds in the context of smart grids. As more and more critical information systems are outsourced in the cloud and personal data captured by sensors embedded in smart objects and smartphones are stored in the cloud, we will investigate security and privacy issues in two directions: cloud security monitoring and personal data protection in cloud-based IoT applications.

    System research requires experimental validation based on simulation and/or prototyping. Reproducible experimentation is essential. We will contribute to the design and implementation of simulators well suited to the study of distributed clouds (architecture, energy consumption) and of large scale experimentation platforms for distributed systems enabling reproducible experiments.

    Last activity report : 2023

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