Programming Scalable Cloud Services with AEON

TL;DR

AEON is a framework that simplifies programming scalable, consistent, and elastic cloud services using the actor model, enabling efficient multi-actor event handling without performance loss.

Contribution

It introduces AEON, a novel framework that ensures serializable, starvation-free multi-actor event execution with transparent actor migration for scalable cloud applications.

Findings

Achieves high parallelism in multi-actor event processing.

Supports transparent actor migration without performance penalties.

Maintains strong consistency and scalability in cloud services.

Abstract

Designing low-latency cloud-based applications that are adaptable to unpredictable workloads and efficiently utilize modern cloud computing platforms is hard. The actor model is a popular paradigm that can be used to develop distributed applications: actors encapsulate state and communicate with each other by sending events. Consistency is guaranteed if each event only accesses a single actor, thus eliminating potential data races and deadlocks. However it is nontrivial to provide consistency for concurrent events spanning across multiple actors. This paper addresses this problem by introducing AEON: a framework that provides the following properties: (i) Programmability: programmers only need to reason about sequential semantics when reasoning about concurrency resulting from multi-actor events; (ii) Scalability: AEON runtime protocol guarantees serializable and starvation-free execution of multi-actor events, while maximizing parallel execution; (iii) Elasticity: AEON supports fine-grained elasticity enabling the programmer to transparently migrate individual actors without violating the consistency or entailing significant performance overheads. Our empirical results show that it is possible to combine the best of all the above three worlds without compromising on the application performance.