The Development of A Large-Scale Cloud Emulator

Building a realistic and scalable cloud emulator is a significant and unaddressed challenge in the cloud industry. The hyper-scale nature of modern cloud environments, encompassing millions of servers and network devices, combined with the complexity of multiple layers of network virtualization in both underlay and overlay networks, and the heterogeneity of devices from various vendors and models, makes this a complex task. This study develops a large-scale cloud emulator that supports the automatic and flexible configuration of both cloud underlay and overlay networks at scale. The underlay networks emulate various data center topologies and heterogeneous hardware, while the overlay networks emulate virtualized networks and associated private resources, such as networking, storage, services, and virtualization. In the end-to-end performance test, this proposed cloud emulator can emulate both emulated physical machines (EPMs) and emulated virtual machines (EVMs) in the underlay and overlay network, where 100,000 EVMs are emulated with a high emulation density of 10,000 EVMs per EPM in 20 mins. This study also showcases the emulation of a cloud data center in a 200-node Kubernetes cluster in AWS EC2, deploying 10,000 EPMs in a Clos network topology with 500,000 EVMs.