Programming model support for dependable, elastic cloud applications

An attractive approach to leveraging the ability of cloud-computing platforms to provide resources on demand is to build elastic applications, which can scale up or down based on resource requirements. To ease the develop-ment of elastic applications, it is useful for programmers to write applications with simple, inelastic semantics and rely on runtime systems to provide elasticity. While this approach has been useful in restricted domains, such as MapReduce, we argue in this paper that adding elasticity to general distributed applications introduces new fault-tolerance challenges that must be addressed at the pro-gramming model and run-time level. We discuss a pro-gramming model for writing elastic, distributed applica-tions, and describe an approach to fault-tolerance that in-tegrates with the elastic run-time to provide transparent elasticity and fault-tolerance.