TY - GEN
T1 - On the impact of virtualization on Dropbox-like cloud file storage/synchronization services
AU - Wang, Haiyang
AU - Shea, Ryan
AU - Wang, Feng
AU - Liu, Jiangchuan
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Powered by cloud computing, Dropbox not only provides reliable file storage but also enables effective file synchronization and user collaboration. This new generation of service, beyond conventional client/server or peer-to-peer file hosting with storage only, has attracted a vast number of Internet users. It is however known that the synchronization delay of Dropbox-like systems is increasing with their expansion, often beyond the accepted level for practical collaboration. In this paper, we present an initial measurement to understand the design and performance bottleneck of the proprietary Dropbox system. Our measurement identifies the cloud servers/instances utilized by Dropbox, revealing its hybrid design with both Amazon's S3 (for storage) and Amazon's EC2 (for computation). The mix of bandwidth-intensive tasks (such as content delivery) and computation-intensive tasks (such as compare hash values for the contents) in Dropbox enables seamless collaboration and file synchronization among multiple users; yet their interference, revealed in our experiments, creates a severe bottleneck that prolongs the synchronization delay with virtual machines in the cloud, which has not seen in conventional physical machines. We thus re-model the resource provisioning problem in the Dropbox-like systems and present an interference-aware solution that smartly allocates the Dropbox tasks to different cloud instances. Evaluation results show that our solution remarkably reduces the synchronization delay for this new generation of file hosting service.
AB - Powered by cloud computing, Dropbox not only provides reliable file storage but also enables effective file synchronization and user collaboration. This new generation of service, beyond conventional client/server or peer-to-peer file hosting with storage only, has attracted a vast number of Internet users. It is however known that the synchronization delay of Dropbox-like systems is increasing with their expansion, often beyond the accepted level for practical collaboration. In this paper, we present an initial measurement to understand the design and performance bottleneck of the proprietary Dropbox system. Our measurement identifies the cloud servers/instances utilized by Dropbox, revealing its hybrid design with both Amazon's S3 (for storage) and Amazon's EC2 (for computation). The mix of bandwidth-intensive tasks (such as content delivery) and computation-intensive tasks (such as compare hash values for the contents) in Dropbox enables seamless collaboration and file synchronization among multiple users; yet their interference, revealed in our experiments, creates a severe bottleneck that prolongs the synchronization delay with virtual machines in the cloud, which has not seen in conventional physical machines. We thus re-model the resource provisioning problem in the Dropbox-like systems and present an interference-aware solution that smartly allocates the Dropbox tasks to different cloud instances. Evaluation results show that our solution remarkably reduces the synchronization delay for this new generation of file hosting service.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84866626325&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84866626325&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/IWQoS.2012.6245967
DO - 10.1109/IWQoS.2012.6245967
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84866626325
SN - 9781467312981
T3 - IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service, IWQoS
BT - 2012 IEEE 20th International Workshop on Quality of Service, IWQoS 2012
T2 - 2012 IEEE 20th International Workshop on Quality of Service, IWQoS 2012
Y2 - 4 June 2012 through 5 June 2012
ER -