Distributed application configuration, management, and visualization with plush

Abstract

Support for distributed application management in large-scale networked environments remains in its early stages. Although a number of solutions exist for subtasks of application deployment, monitoring, and maintenance in distributed environments, few tools provide a unified framework for application management. Many of the existing tools address the management needs of a single type of application or service that runs in a specific environment, and these tools are not adaptable enough to be used for other applications or platforms. To this end, we present the design and implementation of Plush, a fully configurable application management infrastructure designed to meet the general requirements of several different classes of distributed applications. Plush allows developers to specifically define the flow of control needed by their computations using application building blocks. Through an extensible resource management interface, Plush supports execution in a variety of environments, including both live deployment platforms and emulated clusters. Plush also uses relaxed synchronization primitives for improving fault tolerance and liveness in failure-prone environments. To gain an understanding of how Plush manages different classes of distributed applications, we take a closer look at specific applications and evaluate how Plush provides support for each.

Managing Distributed Applications Using Gush

“…The design and implementation of Gush greatly leverages our previous work with Plush; however, this paper focuses on GENI-specific extensions to Gush. A detailed discussion of the design and implementation of Plush can be found in [7]. It is important to note that Gush and Plush were both initially designed for the PlanetLab control framework, and the performance and operation of both systems on PlanetLab is largely the same.…”

“…A thorough description of the Gush XML-RPC interface and implementation details are described in [7]; we provide a brief summary here only to help the reader appreciate the flexibility of the Gush resource management framework. ORCA provides users with the ability to create clusters of Xen virtual machines [17] or Linux vservers [16] on demand.…”

“…With respect to related work, it is worthwhile to point out the key differences between this paper and [7]. The goal of this paper is to highlight how Gush manages resources in a variety of environments, while the focus of [7] is on the design and implementation of the experiment controller architecture.…”

“…The goal of this paper is to highlight how Gush manages resources in a variety of environments, while the focus of [7] is on the design and implementation of the experiment controller architecture. In addition, this paper discusses several extensions that were added to Gush specifically for GENI that are not part of Plush.…”

“…Gush leverages prior work with Plush [7,8], and is being developed as part of the GENI project. Gush accomplishes experiment control through an easily-adapted application specification language and resource management system.…”