Transfer as a Service: Towards a Cost-Effective Model for Multi-Site Cloud Data Management

International audienceThe global deployment of cloud datacenters is enabling large web services to deliver fast response to users worldwide. This unprecedented geographical distribution of the computation also brings new challenges related to the efficient data management across sites. High throughput, low latencies, cost- or energy-related trade-offs are just a few concerns for both cloud providers and users when it comes to handling data across datacenters. Existing cloud data management solutions are limited to cloud-provided storage, which offers low performance based on rigid cost schemas. Users are therefore forced to design and deploy custom solutions, achieving performance at the cost of complex system configurations, maintenance overheads, reduced reliability and reusability. In this paper, we are proposing a dedicated cloud data transfer service that supports largescale data dissemination across geographically distributed sites, advocating for a Transfer as a Service (TaaS) paradigm. The system aggregates the available bandwidth by enabling multiroute transfers across cloud sites. We argue that the adoption of such a TaaS approach brings several benefits for both users and the cloud providers who propose it. For users of multi-site or federated clouds, our proposal is able to decrease the variability of transfers and increase the throughput up to three times compared to baseline user options, while benefiting from the well-known high availability of cloud-provided services. For cloud providers, such a service can decrease the energy consumption within a datacenter down to half compared to user-based transfers. Finally, we propose a dynamic cost model schema for the service usage, which enables the cloud providers to regulate and encourage data exchanges via a data transfer market