DataSlicer: A Hosting Platform For Data-Centric Network Services

As theWeb evolves, the number of network services deployed on the Internet has been growing at a dramatic pace. Such services usually involve a massive volume of data stored in physical or virtual back-end databases, and access the data to dynamically generate responses for client requests. These characteristics restrict use of traditional mechanisms for improving service performance and scalability: large volumes prevent replication of the service data at multiple sites required by content distribution schemes, while dynamic responses do not support the reuse required by web caching schemes. However, many deployed data-centric network services share other properties that can help alleviate this situation: (1) service usage patterns exhibit locality of various forms, and (2) services are accessed using standard protocols and publicly known message structures. When properly exploited, these characteristics enable the design of alternative caching infrastructures, which leverage distributed network intermediaries to inspect traffic flowing between clients and services, infer locality information dynamically, and potentially improve service performance by taking actions such as partial service replication, request redirection, or admission control. This dissertation investigates the nature of locality in service usage patterns for