Toward a Cloud Operating System

Cloud computing is characterized today by a hotchpotch of elements and solutions, namely operating systems running on a single virtualized computing environment, middleware layers that attempt to combine physical and virtualized resources from multiple operating systems, and specialized application engines that leverage a key asset of the cloud service provider (e.g. Google's BigTable). Yet, there does not exist a virtual distributed operating system that ties together these cloud resources into a unified processing environment that is easy to program, flexible, scalable, self-managed, and dependable. In this position paper, we advocate the importance of a virtual distributed operating system, a Cloud OS, as a catalyst in unlocking the real potential of the Cloud-a computing platform with seemingly infinite CPU, memory, storage and network resources. Following established Operating Systems and Distributed Systems principles laid out by UNIX and subsequent research efforts, the Cloud OS aims to provide simple programming abstractions to available cloud resources, strong isolation techniques between Cloud processes, and strong integration with network resources. At the same time, our Cloud OS design is tailored to the challenging environment of the Cloud by emphasizing elasticity, autonomous decentralized management, and fault tolerance.