Blutopia: Cluster Life-cycle Management

We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype named Blutopia that embodies our ideas of a new software life cycle management paradigm driven chiefly by simplicity. Aiming at facilitating management, Blutopia allows administrators to deploy multiple machines fast and effortlessly in as little time as it takes to perform a system reboot. It is equally easy to manage and augment the deployed infrastructure by assigning new roles, upgrading existing roles, and rolling back software versions and/or configuration in the event of unexpected problems arising from an administrative task. Underlying our administrative paradigm is stackable file system technology providing the ability to efficiently manipulate layers of the file system, perform instantaneous snapshots, and institute copy-on-write layers to capture local modifications to an otherwise shared system or application image. We conducted a preliminary performance analysis of our mechanism and concluded that it degraded neither the performance nor scalability of the cluster nodes on which it was deployed. Supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract no. NBCH30390004.