Virtualization Considered Harmful: OS Design Directions for Well-Conditioned Services

We argue that existing OS designs are ill-suited for the needs of Internet service applications. These applications demand massive concurrency (supporting a large number of requests per second) and must be well-conditioned to load (avoiding degradation of performance and predictability when demand exceeds capacity). The transparency and virtualization provided by existing operating systems leads to limited concurrency and lack of control over resource usage. We claim that Internet services would be far better supported by operating systems by reconsidering the role of resource virtualization. We propose a new design for server applications, the staged event-driven architecture (SEDA). In SEDA, applications are constructed as a set of eventdriven stages separated by queues. We present the SEDA architecture and its consequences for operating system design.