Nefele: Process Orchestration for the Cloud

Abstract: Virtualization, either at OS- or hardware level, plays an important role in cloud computing. It enables easier automation and faster deployment in distributed environments. While virtualized infrastructures provide a level of management flexibility, they lack practical abstraction of the distributed resources. A developer in such an environment still needs to deal with all the complications of building a distributed software system. Different orchestration systems are built to provide that abstraction; however, they do not solve the inherent challenges of distributed systems, such as synchronization issues or resilience to failures. This paper introduces Nefele, a decentralized process orchestration system that automatically deploys and manages individual processes, rather than containers/VMs, within a cluster. Nefele is inspired by the Single System Image (SSI) vision of mitigating the intricacies of remote execution, yet it maintains the flexibility and performance of virtualized infrastructures. Nefele offers a set of APIs for building cloud-native applications that lets the developer easily build, deploy, and scale applications in a cloud environment. We have implemented and deployed Nefele on a cluster in our datacenter and evaluated its performance. Our evaluations show that Nefele can effectively deploy, scale, and monitor processes across a distributed environment, while it incorporates essential primitives to build a distributed software system.