A computation migration approach to elasticity of cloud computing

Code mobility is the capability to dynamically change the bindings between code fragments and the location where they are executed. While it is not a new concept, code mobility has reentered the limelight because of its potential uses for cloud computing—a megatrend in recent years. The strongest form of mobility allows the execution state of a computational component to be captured and restored on another node where execution is seamlessly continued. Computation migration can achieve dynamic load balancing, improve data access locality, and serve as the enabling mechanism for auto-provisioning of cloud computing resources. Therefore, it is worthwhile to study the concepts behind computation migration and its performance in a multi-instance cloud platform. This chapter introduces a handful of migration techniques working at diverse granularities for use in cloud computing. In particular, this chapter highlights an innovative idea termed stack-on-demand (SOD), which enables ultra-lightweight computation migrations and delivers a flexible execution model for mobile cloud applications