Vertigo: Programmable Micro-controllers for Software-Defined Object Storage

Software-defined storage (SDS) aims to minimize the complexity of data management in the Cloud. SDS decouples the control plane from the data plane and simplifies the management of the storage system via automated storage policy enforcement. In this paper, we propose a novel SDS framework for Object Storage that allows to decentralize policy enforcement through the deployment of per-object management policies in the storage nodes. As in active storage systems, we leverage the underutilized CPU time in the storage nodes. But our framework goes one step further. It provides a new management abstraction called micro-controllers which operate on objects depending on their state and content, thereby permitting the implementation of sophisticated management policies, such as the automated deletion of an object based on its access history, and even allowing the orchestration of active storage tasks. Our SDS system avoids the massive interception of data flows by moving that logic to the appropriate objects. Furthermore, our extensible model simplifies the customization of Object Storage services. We present in the validation several interesting use cases such as automated deletion, content level access control, and Web prefetching.