Emusphere: Evaluating Planetary-Scale Distributed Systems in Automated Emulation Environments

This paper presents Emusphere, an integrated emulation platform for the efficient evaluation of planetary-scale distributed systems. It allows system developers and architects to assess their systems in an environment that is able to provision any desired computation infrastructure, mimic realistic environmental conditions, and carry out arbitrary usage scenarios. Unlike existing testbeds which suffer from technical complexity and high bootstrapping efforts, Emusphere is an easy-to-use and fully automated environment. This is achieved by reducing the complete configuration and execution efforts down to the definition of a single configuration file that defines the structure and course of the experiments. Those Experiment Descriptors are executed using Emusphere Executors which utilize resource providers to provision any specified virtual infrastructure, run the defined experiment steps, collect the results and finally tear down the whole environment. In this way experiments can be easily modified, reproduced, transferred and verified. We also provide an evaluation which shows that our approach surpasses existing solutions in terms of flexibility and usability while offering a high degree of scalability.