Software-defined data services: Interoperable and network-aware big data executions

Services that access or process a large volume of data are known as data services. Big data frameworks consist of diverse storage media and heterogeneous data formats. Through their service-based approach, data services offer a standardized execution model to big data frameworks. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) increases the programmability of the network, by unifying the control plane centrally, away from the distributed data plane devices. In this paper, we present Software-Defined Data Services (SDDS), extending the data services with the SDN paradigm. SDDS consists of two aspects. First, it models the big data executions as data services or big services composed of several data services. Then, it orchestrates the services centrally in an interoperable manner, by logically separating the executions from the storage. We present the design of an SDDS orchestration framework for network-aware big data executions in data centers. We then evaluate the performance of SDDS through microbenchmarks on a prototype implementation. By extending SDN beyond data centers, we can deploy SDDS in broader execution environments.