ZeroVM: secure distributed processing for big data analytics

A key challenge for any large-scale computation today, whether in “big data” or in handling large-scale web services, has to do with the management of data. In the big data context, the arbitrary separation of storage and computation increases latency and decreases performance. ZeroVM is a lightweight container-based virtualization platform that provides deterministic process execution and isolation. The philosophy behind ZeroVM is to virtualize applications then move the application to the data. This provides the ability to transform or process data in situ, rather than moving data to where the application is located. With the ability to move and execute application next to data, ZeroVM changes the conventional wisdom on infrastructure centric commuting models and enables even more data centric computing models to be used for Big-Data Analytics. The ZeroVM distributed processing framework proposed in this paper presents new opportunities for processing, storing and using data, particularly in big data analytics.