Shaping the Future of Cloud for the Next Era of Computing

Datacenters are evolving fast allowing ultra-low latency, high bandwidth, and more programmability, while introducing new interconnects that radically change how we build distributed systems. Datacenters primarily host two types of workloads: cloud computing and bespoke applications. Cloud computing offers on-demand and elastic access to shared compute, networking, and storage resources, is ubiquitous and growing at an exponential pace. Bespoke datacenter applications, such as websearch, are special-purpose services developed and deployed by tech companies. There is a dichotomy between those two types of workloads regarding the evolution of the datacenter software and hardware ecosystem, with bespoke applications fully adopting recent advancements, while cloud computing only evolving incrementally and failing to absorb new hardware and protocols. This is due to fundamental differences between the two settings, and design choices in the existing cloud architecture and the way it has evolved, which end up harming efficiency, reducing the performance and quality of service cloud tenants receive, and slowing down cloud evolution.CLOUDNG designs the next generation of cloud infrastructure to fully leverage the modern datacenter. It accelerates and introduces novel abstractions that encapsulate emerging hardware and protocols without exposing their internals, and offers quality of service equivalent to bespoke applications without compromising ease of use. It re-envisions the cloud architecture and proposes new ways to implement resource allocation and elasticity by specifically designing for the datacenter environment, thus enabling superior performance, performance predictability, new cloud products, and measurable sustainability through appropriate metrics and incentives, while preparing the cloud for a new hardware era.This is an ambitious project pushing the state of the art in cloud and datacenter research, yet, a necessary step towards future cloud innovation.