Albert Greenberg and I missed Hotnets 2008 last week due to a conflicting meeting down in California but Ken Church was there to present our On Delivering Embarrassingly Distributed Cloud Services paper.  I summarized the paper in a recent blog entry:  Embarrassingly Distributed Cloud Services and the abstract from the paper follows:

 Very large data centers are very expensive (servers, power/cooling, networking, physical plant.) Newer, geo-diverse, distributed or containerized designs offer a more economical alternative. We argue that a significant portion of cloud services are embarrassingly distributed – meaning there are high performance realizations that do not require massive internal communication among large server pools. We argue further that these embarrassingly distributed applications are a good match for realization in small distributed data center designs. We consider email delivery as an illustrative example. Geo-diversity in the design not only im-proves costs, scale and reliability, but also realizes advantages stemming from edge processing; in applications such as spam filtering, unwanted traffic can be blocked near the source to reduce transport costs.

The Hotnets agenda and all the papers present5ed are up at: Seventh ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks.

The slides ken presented are posted at:

·         pptx form:  http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2008/slides/EmbarrassinglyDistributed6.pptx

·         pdf form:  EmbarrassinglyDistributedFinalSlides.pdf (724.17 KB)

James Hamilton, Data Center Futures
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