Jad Darrous

Recently, most large cloud providers, like Amazon and Microsoft, replicate their Virtual Machine Images (VMIs) on multiple geographically distributed data centers to offer fast service provisioning. Provisioning a service may require to transfer a VMI over the wide-area network (WAN) and therefore is dictated by the distribution of VMIs and the network bandwidth in-between sites. Nevertheless, existing methods to facilitate VMI management (i.e., retrieving VMIs) overlook network heterogeneity in geo-distributed clouds. In this paper, we design, implement and evaluate Nitro, a novel VMI management system that helps to minimize the transfer time of VMIs over a heterogeneous WAN. To achieve this goal, Nitro incorporates two complementary features. First, it makes use of deduplication to reduce the amount of data which will be transferred due to the high similarities within an image and in-between images. Second, Nitro is equipped with a network-aware data transfer strategy to effective...

This thesis focuses on scalable data management solutions to accelerate service provisioning and enable efficient execution of data-intensive applications in large-scale distributed clouds. Data-intensive applications are increasingly running on distributed infrastructures (multiple clusters). The main two reasons for such a trend are 1) moving computation to data sources can eliminate the latency of data transmission, and 2) storing data on one site may not be feasible given the continuous increase of data size.On the one hand, most applications run on virtual clusters to provide isolated services, and require virtual machine images (VMIs) or container images to provision such services. Hence, it is important to enable fast provisioning of virtualization services to reduce the waiting time of new running services or applications. Different from previous work, during the first part of this thesis, we worked on optimizing data retrieval and placement considering challenging issues in...