Transparent Clouds: An Enhancement to Abstraction

Abstract: With the introduction of various hardware/software technologies such as Cloud Technologies or Virtualization technologies, there has been a great potential to reuse ICT artifacts thanks to Abstraction and also Exchangeability features achieved via these technologies. These technologies also provide various advantages with respect to sustainability including resource consumption reduction (in the use phase only or in the whole life cycle). However, there is an additional but untapped potential associated with the anonymization of resources introduced by both abstraction and exchangeability features. By realizing on this potential, we can improve cloud solutions and reduce their by-product opacity, which usually prevents leveraging on the specialized but tweakable (i.e., nonessential modifications without changing the main function) features of components that are captured in the component models. This is especially a challenge in the case heterogeneous/disaggregated infrastructure where developing models to cover everything is practically impossible. In this work, by leveraging on the concept of pathways, we develop a few mechanisms that enable transparency and therefore tweakability of features even in the presence of abstraction and heterogeneity. In particular, the layered-stack approach to system decomposition is considered because of its role in both software defined networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) system decompositions. For a concrete example, the case of dynamic frequency scaling of processors is considered and it is shown that the associated consumption could be considerably reduced without requiring additional changes to the middle components.