Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Filesystems: Addressing The Last-Mile “Problem” In Services-Oriented/Cloud Computing, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

We have designed and implemented RestFS, a software framework that provides a uniform, configurable connector layer for mapping remote web-based resources to local filesystem-based resources, recognizing the similarity between these two types of resources. Such mappings enable programmatic access to a resource, as well as composition of two or more resources, through the local operating system’s standard filesystem application programming interface (API), script-able file-based command-line utilities, and interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms. The framework supports automatic and manual authentication.

As part of this talk, we demonstrate a new filesystem that interfaces to the SketchFab.com service to support 3D model visualization. For …

An Object-Oriented Framework For Userland Filesystem Development, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

Userland filesystems (also known as virtual/installable filesystems) represent a promising direction for interfacing the traditional filesystem concept to specific domain instances (e.g. finance, bioinformatics, astronomy, photo sharing services, etc.) One might initially be inclined to think of filesystems as “old school” or “so 1980s” but their use remains an established practice in computational science and in many business domains, owing to the stability of filesystems interfaces and the continued perception of having great overall performance. While the promise of building one’s own userland filesystems is great, the approach has seen little adoption, owing to the complexity of working with low-level …

Restfs: The Filesystem As A Connector Abstraction For Flexible Resource And Service Composition, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

The broader context for this chapter comprises business scenarios requiring resource and/or service composition, such as (intra-company) enterprise application integration (EAI) and (inter-company) web service orchestration. The resources and services involved vary widely in terms of the protocols they support, which typically fall into remote procedure call (RPC)~\citeBirrell84implementingremote, resource-oriented (HTTP~\citeFielding96hypertexttransfer and WEBDAV~\citewebdav) and message-oriented protocols. By recognizing the similarity between web-based resources and the kind of resources exposed in the form of filesystems in operating systems, we have found it feasible to map the former to the latter using a uniform, configurable connector layer. Once a remote resource has been …

Online Layered File System (Olfs): A Layered And Versioned Filesystem And Performance Analysis, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

We present a novel form of intra-volume directory layering with hierarchical, inheritance-like namespace unification. While each layer of an OLFS volume constitutes a subvolume that can be mounted separately in a fan-in configuration, the entire hierarchy is always accessible (online) and fully navigable through any mounted layer. OLFS uses a relational database to store its layering metadata and either a relational database or any (virtual) host file system as its backing store, along with metadata and block caching for improved performance. Because OLFS runs as a virtual file system in user-space, its capabilities are available to all existing software without …

Restfs: Resources And Services Are Filesystems, Too, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

We have designed and implemented RestFS, a software frame-work that provides a uniform, configurable connector layerfor mapping remote web-based resources to local filesystem-based resources, recognizing the similarity between thesetwo types of resources. Such mappings enable programmaticaccess to a resource, as well as composition of two or moreresources, through the local operating system’s standardfilesystem application programming interface (API), script-able file-based command-line utilities, and inter-process com-munication (IPC) mechanisms. The framework supports au-tomatic and manual authentication. We include several ex-amples intended to show the utility and practicality of ourframework.