ADON: Application-Driven Overlay Network-as-a-Service for Data-Intensive Science

Campuses are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud architectures for supporting data-intensive science applications that require “on-demand” resources, which are not always available locally on-site. Policies at the campus edge for handling multiple such applications competing for remote resources can cause bottlenecks across applications. These bottlenecks can be proactively avoided with pertinent profiling, monitoring and control of application flows using software-defined networking and pertinent selection of local or remote compute resources. In this paper, we present an “application-driven overlay network-as-a-service” (ADON) that manages the hybrid cloud requirements of multiple applications in a scalable and extensible manner by allowing users to specify requirements of the application that are translated into the underlying network and compute provisioning requirements. Our solution involves scheduling transit selection, a cost optimized selection of site(s) for computation and traffic engineering at the campus-edge based upon real-time policy control that ensures prioritized application performance delivery for multi-tenant traffic profiles. We validate our ADON approach through an emulation study and through a wide-area overlay network testbed implementation across two campuses. Our workflow orchestration results show the ADON effectiveness in handling temporal behavior of multi-tenant traffic burst arrivals using profiles from a diverse set of actual data-intensive applications.