Experience with Seattle: A Community Platform for Research and Education

Hands-on experience is a critical part of research and education. Today's distributed testbeds fulfill that need for many students studying networking, distributed systems, cloud computing, security, operating systems, and similar topics. In this work, we discuss one such testbed, Seattle. Seattle is an open research and educational testbed that utilizes computational resources provided by end users on their existing devices. Unlike most other platforms, resources are not dedicated to the platform which allows a greater degree of network diversity and realism at the cost of programmability. Seattle is designed to preserve user security and to minimally impact application performance. We describe the architectural design of Seattle, and summarize our experiences with Seattle over the past few years as both researchers and educators. We have found that Seattle is very easy to adopt due to cross-platform support, and is also surprisingly easy for students to use. While there are programmability limitations, it is possible to construct complex applications integrated with real devices, networks, and users with Seattle as a core component. From an educational standpoint, Seattle has been shown not only to be useful as a teaching tool, it has been successful in variety of different systems classes at a variety of different types of schools. In our experience, when low-level programmability is not the main requirement, Seattle can supersede many existing testbeds for diverse educational and research tasks.