The Case for the Superfluid Cloud

The confluence of a number of relatively recent trends including the development of virtualization technologies, the deployment of micro datacenters at PoPs, and the availability of microservers, opens up the possibility of evolving the cloud, and the network it is connected to, towards a superfluid cloud: a model where parties other than infrastructure owners can quickly deploy and mi- grate virtualized services throughout the network (in the core, at aggregation points and at the edge), enabling a number of novel use cases including virtualized CPEs and on-the-fly services, among others.Towards this goal, we identify a number of required mechanisms and present early evaluation results of their implementation. On an inexpensive commodity server, we are able to concurrently run up to 10,000 specialized virtual machines, instantiate a VM in as little as 10 mil- liseconds, and migrate it in under 100 milliseconds.

Filipe Manco, Joao Martins, Kenichi Yasukata, Jose Mendes, Simon Kuenzer, Felipe Huici. HotCloud 2015 6-7 July 2015 Santa Clara, CA