COSCAnet: Virtualized Sockets for Scalable and Flexible PaaS Applications

Platform as a Service (PaaS) eases cloud deployment by automating placement decisions, scaling, and maintenance of the infrastructure. Yet, most PaaS offerings restrict network support to HTTP so that applications needing other protocols can hardly be deployed. COSCAnet is a PaaS-cloud network layer that virtualizes the well-known socket interface for UDP and TCP. Thus, legacy applications and protocol implementations can be reused in a PaaS cloud, and most of the typical network restrictions of PaaS can be released. COSCAnet also supports scale-out of applications. Our evaluations show that COSCAnet is not only more flexible but also has lower overhead and higher throughput compared to typical setups, while having only low demands on the underlying network infrastructure. As a result, COSCAnet is a leap forward towards more flexible PaaS systems that support arbitrary application protocols.