File System As-a-Service: Providing Transient and Consistent Views of Files to Cooperating Applications in Clouds

The current implementations of File System for distributed environments are mainly storage-oriented, have rigid schemas and are little configurable. These aspects make them unsuitable for handling the dynamicity of cloud environments. In this paper, the authors introduce the concept of File System as a Services (FSaaS), providing an high configurable cloud service that enables distributed applications to define their own rules and policies for managing sets of files shared among themselves. In particular, the FSaaS aims to create a logical virtual space, containing references to shared files, whose management layer supports the same functionalities of a file system (i.e. basic file operations), but where each single file can have different policies for consistency, synchronization, security, replication and accessing rules. This introductory work illustrates some design considerations and the basic architecture of the proposed service.