AHAFS subsystem for enhancing operating system health in the cloud computing era

Abstract

Cloud computing is becoming an important paradigm for information technology (IT) infrastructures. A key advantage of cloud computing is its ability to decrease the cost of computing for a variety of applications. For the infrastructure layer, which includes servers and operating systems (OSs), cost reduction is achieved through the consolidation of many OS instances onto a single physical server and through significant improvements in system-administrator productivity. However, these productivity improvements require a scalable easy-to-use OS event-management subsystem so that the higher level software can reliably and effectively automate operations. This paper presents the design and implementation of an OS event-monitoring subsystem called Autonomic Health Advisor FileSystem (AHAFS) that is scalable, has little system-performance overhead, and provides instantaneous event notifications with useful information, for improving the robustness, security, and performance of an OS instance. AHAFS is extensible and can monitor various events for a wide variety of event consumers. AHAFS does not require the use of a new application programming interface (API) but uses the ubiquitous filesystem API; hence, AHAFS is usable by monitoring applications written in any of the languages commonly used for monitoring (e.g., C, C++, Perl® and Java®) without requiring additional runtime modules or packages. © 2010 IBM.