Volley: Automated Data Placement for
Geo-distributed Cloud Services
Presented ByKomal Pal
VaibhavRastogi
Agenda
 Introduction
 Motivation
 Design & Implementation
 Evaluation
 Conclusions and Future Work
Introduction
 Volley is a system for cloud services that performs automatic
placement across geo-distributed datacenters and takes care of  User perceived latencies
 Business constraints - Datacenter resources, bandwidth costs
Motivation
Motivation
 Problem : Automated data placement for serving each user
from the best datacenter for that user.
 Simplistic solution : Migrate data to DC geographically closest
to user
 Challenges : Costs to DC operator –
 WAN bandwidth between DCs
 Skewed DC utilization due to over-provisioning
Motivation
 Need of a new heuristic that can meet latest trends in
modern cloud services :
 Shared data
 Data Inter-dependencies
 Application changes
 Reaching DC capacity limits
 User mobility
Cloud service trends
 Live Mesh , Live Messenger: month-long workload traces
a) Data Inter-dependencies
Cloud Service Trends
b) Client Geographic Diversity
Cloud Service Trends
c) Geographically Distant Data Sharing
Cloud Service Trends
d) Client Mobility
Volley!
 First research work to address placement of data across geo-
distributed DCs.
 Incorporates an iterative optimization algorithm based on
weighted spherical means that handles complexities of shared
data and data inter-dependencies.
Design and Implementation
Design
Typical dataflow of an application using Volley
Design
 Workflow –
Request logging : timestamp, src, dst, req_size, id
Additional inputs –
a)
b)
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requirements of RAM, disk, CPU for each type of data
capacity & cost model for all DCs
Model of inter-DC latency and client-DC latencies
Any additional constraints e.g. legal
Application specific migration
Algorithm
Phase 1: Compute initial placement : weighted spherical means
Phase 2: Iteratively move data to reduce latency: weighted
spring model, spherical coordinates
Phase 3: Iteratively collapse data to DCs
Evaluation
Evaluation
 Comparison of Volley with –
 commonIP: data at DC closest to user
 oneDC: all data in one DC
 hash : hash data to DCs for load-balancing
 Analytical evaluation using 12 commercial DCs as potential
locations.
Evaluation : DC capacity skew
Evaluation : Inter-datacenter traffic
Evaluation : User-perceived latency
Evaluation: Volley vsCommonIPon a live
system
Evaluation : Convergence
Evaluation: Convergence
Evaluation : Resource Demands &
Frequent re-computation
 Small operational cost compared to operational savings in
B/W consumption
Conclusion and Future Work
Conclusions and Future Work
 Need for automated techniques to place data across geo-
distributed DCs
 Volley is the first system in this domain
 Volley is based on analysis of traces of 2 large scale commercial
cloud services – Live Mesh & Live Messenger
Conclusions and Future Work
 Reduces DC capacity skew by over 2x, inter-DC traffic by
over 1.8x and 75th percentile latency by over 30%
 What’s next - Using Volley to identify potential DC sites that
will improve latency at modest cost
Thank You!
Limitations
 Analysis may not be representative – only 2 applications, MS
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specific. (data with interdependencies etc. – very representative).
Latency improvements are not very significant – no real costbenefit analysis. (confidentiality issues)
Too simplistic to assume that only one such policy is in use at
every datacenter without any optimization. (most common case – no
other published work to show other alternatives)
Uses only geographic location – no RTT analysis (first foray into this
area, can be combined with other approaches for further optimization)
Dependency on geo-location databases – may not be accurate,
always. (still an improvement over existing mechanisms, may not even
require higher granularity than what is being offered by DB)