Chapter 4 – Cloud Computing

Applications and Paradigms

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Contents
■ Challenges for cloud computing.
■ Architectural styles for cloud applications.
■ Workflows - coordination of multiple activities.
■ Coordination based on a state machine model.
■ The MapReduce programming model.
■ A case study: the GrepTheWeb application.

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Challenges for cloud application development
■ Performance isolation - nearly impossible to reach in a real system,
especially when the system is heavily loaded.

■ Reliability - major concern; server failures expected when a large

number of servers cooperate for the computations.

■ Cloud infrastructure exhibits latency and bandwidth fluctuations

which affect the application performance.

■ Performance considerations limit the amount of data logging; the

ability to identify the source of unexpected results and errors is
helped by frequent logging.

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Architectural styles for cloud applications
■ Based on the client-server paradigm.
■ Stateless servers - view a client request as an independent
transaction and respond to it; the client is not required to first
establish a connection to the server.
■ Often clients and servers communicate using Remote Procedure
Calls (RPCs).
■ Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) - application protocol for
web applications; message format based on the XML. Uses TCP
or UDP transport protocols.
■ Representational State Transfer (REST) - software architecture
for distributed hypermedia systems. Supports client
communication with stateless servers, it is platform independent,
language independent, supports data caching, and can be used in
the presence of firewalls.

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Workflows
■ Process description - structure describing the tasks to be
executed and the order of their execution. Resembles a flowchart.

■ Case - an instance of a process description.

■ State of a case at time t - defined in terms of tasks already

completed at that time.

■ Events - cause transitions between states.

■ The life cycle of a workflow - creation, definition, verification, and

enactment; similar to the life cycle of a traditional program
(creation, compilation, and execution).

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Safety and liveness

■ Desirable properties of workflows.

■ Safety nothing “bad” ever happens.

■ Liveness something “good” will eventually happen.

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 Basic workflow patterns
■ Workflow patterns - the temporal relationship among the tasks of a process
■ Sequence - several tasks have to be scheduled one after the completion of
the other.
■ AND split - both tasks B and C are activated when task A terminates.
■ Synchronization - task C can only start after tasks A and B terminate.
■ XOR split - after completion of task A, either B or C can be activated.
■ XOR merge - task C is enabled when either A or B terminate.
■ OR split - after completion of task A one could activate either B, C, or both.
■ Multiple Merge - once task A terminates, B and C execute concurrently;
when the first of them, say B, terminates, then D is activated; then, when C
terminates, D is activated again.
■ Discriminator – wait for a number of incoming branches to complete before
activating the subsequent activity; then wait for the remaining branches to
finish without taking any action until all of them have terminated. Next,
resets itself.

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 Basic workflow patterns (cont’d)
■ N out of M join - barrier synchronization. Assuming that M tasks
run concurrently, N (N<M) of them have to reach the barrier before
the next task is enabled. In our example, any two out of the three
tasks A, B, and C have to finish before E is enabled.
■ Deferred Choice - similar to the XOR split but the choice is not
made explicitly; the run-time environment decides what branch to
take.

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Coordination - ZooKeeper
■ Cloud elasticity distribute computations and data across multiple
systems; coordination among these systems is a critical function in a
distributed environment.
■ ZooKeeper
■ Distributed coordination service for large-scale distributed systems.
■ High throughput and low latency service.
■ Implements a version of the Paxos consensus algorithm.
■ Open-source software written in Java with bindings for Java and C.
■ The servers in the pack communicate and elect a leader.
■ A database is replicated on each server; consistency of the replicas is
maintained.
■ A client connect to a single server, synchronizes its clock with the
server, and sends requests, receives responses and watch events
through a TCP connection.

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Zookeeper communication
■ Messaging layer responsible for the election of a new leader
when the current leader fails.

■ Messaging protocols use:

■ Packets - sequence of bytes sent through a FIFO channel.
■ Proposals - units of agreement.
■ Messages - sequence of bytes atomically broadcast to all
servers.
■ A message is included into a proposal and it is agreed upon
before it is delivered.
■ Proposals are agreed upon by exchanging packets with a
quorum of servers, as required by the Paxos algorithm.

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Zookeeper communication (cont’d)

■ Messaging layer guarantees:

■ Reliable delivery: if a message m is delivered to one server, it will

be eventually delivered to all servers.

■ Total order: if message m is delivered before message n to one

server, it will be delivered before n to all servers.

■ Causal order: if message n is sent after m has been delivered by

the sender of n, then m must be ordered before n.

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Shared hierarchical namespace similar to a
file system; znodes instead of inodes

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ZooKeeper service guarantees
■ Atomicity - a transaction either completes or fails.

■ Sequential consistency of updates - updates are applied strictly

in the order they are received.

■ Single system image for the clients - a client receives the same
response regardless of the server it connects to.

■ Persistence of updates - once applied, an update persists until

it is overwritten by a client.

■ Reliability - the system is guaranteed to function correctly as

long as the majority of servers function correctly.

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Zookeeper API
■ The API is simple - consists of seven operations:

■ Create - add a node at a given location on the tree.

■ Delete - delete a node.

■ Get data - read data from a node.

■ Set data - write data to a node.

■ Get children - retrieve a list of the children of the node.

■ Synch - wait for the data to propagate.

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Elasticity and load distribution
■ Elasticity ability to use as many servers as necessary to optimally
respond to cost and timing constraints of an application.
■ How to divide the load
◻ Transaction processing systems a front-end distributes the incoming
transactions to a number of back-end systems. As the workload
increases new back-end systems are added to the pool.
◻ For data-intensive batch applications two types of divisible workloads are
possible:
■ modularly divisible the workload partitioning is defined a priori.
■ arbitrarily divisible the workload can be partitioned into an
arbitrarily large number of smaller workloads of equal, or very close
size.
■ Many applications in physics, biology, and other areas of
computational science and engineering obey the arbitrarily divisible
load sharing model.

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MapReduce philosophy
1. An application starts a master instance, M worker instances for the
Map phase and later R worker instances for the Reduce phase.
2. The master instance partitions the input data in M segments.
3. Each map instance reads its input data segment and processes
the data.
4. The results of the processing are stored on the local disks of the
servers where the map instances run.
5. When all map instances have finished processing their data, the R
reduce instances read the results of the first phase and merge the
partial results.
6. The final results are written by the reduce instances to a shared
storage server.
7. The master instance monitors the reduce instances and when all of
them report task completion the application is terminated.

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 Case study: GrepTheWeb
■ The application illustrates the means to
◻ create an on-demand infrastructure.
◻ run it on a massively distributed system in a manner that allows
it to run in parallel and scale up and down, based on the number
of users and the problem size.
■ GrepTheWeb
◻ Performs a search of a very large set of records to identify
records that satisfy a regular expression.
◻ It is analogous to the Unix grep command.
◻ The source is a collection of document URLs produced by the
Alexa Web Search, a software system that crawls the web every
night.
◻ Uses message passing to trigger the activities of multiple
controller threads which launch the application, initiate
processing, shutdown the system, and create billing records.
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(a) The simplified workflow
showing the inputs:
- the regular expression.
- the input records generated
by the web crawler.
- the user commands to report
the current status and to
terminate the processing.

(b) The detailed workflow.

The system is based on
message passing between
several queues; four
controller threads
periodically poll their
associated input queues,
retrieve messages, and carry
out the required actions
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