The cloud provider and tenants relationship is common in today's on-demand usage of computing resources. However, the interface between provider and tenants do not consider about the networks. The provider do not guarantee the network resources for the tenants, and let the tenants share the whole network. This high variably networking performance will cause several problems: unpredictable application performance and tenant cost, limited cloud applicability, inefficiency in production and revenue loss.
The authors propose the "virtual networks" as a network abstraction or interface between cloud provider and tenants. The corresponding implemented system is called "Oktopus". Basically, besides the computing instances, they now offer a new network connecting the computing instances. And they provides two abstraction for the virtual network topology. First, "virtual cluster" provides illusion of all VM connecting to a single switch. Second, "virtual oversubscribed cluster" provides an oversubscribed two-layer cluster.
Compared with previous works like Seawall or NetShare which also focus on network sharing in data center, Oktopus can balance the trade-off between the tenant demand and provider flexibility. Other allocation schemes try to allocate arbitrary network thus hamper the system scalability.
The trade off here in Oktopus is the balance between tenants' demand and provider's flexibility.
I think this work will be influential in 10 years, since it is a key issue in current cloud computing environment.
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