ECE Seminar: Canturk Isci

ECE Seminar: Canturk Isci IBM TJ Watson Research Center Research Staff Member - Virtualization and Data Center Energy Management Date: April 28, 2016 (Thurs.), 11 am Location: 8 St. Mary’s St., PHO 339 Faculty Host: Ayse Coskun Light refreshments will be available outside of PHO 339 at 10:45 am. Seamless, Unified Operational Visibility and Analytics Designed for Cloud Abstract: Emerging cloud services allow users to define and provision complex, distributed systems with unprecedented simplicity and agility. With the push of a button, entire stacks of software can be instantiated within minutes with various configurations and customizations. Automation, continuous integration and delivery further simplify the entire lifecycle management of modern born-on-the-cloud applications. These advances also bring in additional research challenges and opportunities for cloud. Operational visibility into the complex, distributed user applications, cloud runtimes and the underlying infrastructure is becoming a persistent pain point for both the end users and the service/platform providers. As the system and configuration complexity grows, data-driven operational analytics for security, compliance, configuration and resource management are becoming key areas of interest. In both cases---of operational visibility and analytics---existing, traditional solutions are either ineffective or insufficient. Their assumptions are based on a different era of computing that no longer applies, with long-running, dedicated systems that can tolerate ample configuration times and resource overheads, and where it is common practice to push monitoring and analytics burden to the end user context. In this talk, Isci proposes a fundamentally-different approach for designing seamless, unified and deep operational visibility and analytics services in the cloud. He first presents Agentless System Crawler, a cloud-native framework, which leverages cloud, virtualization and containerization abstractions to provide complete visibility into running entities in the cloud, without modifying, instrumenting or accessing into the end user context. His approach with crawlers is based on introspection without intrusion, and as-a-service without necessitating guest cooperation. He demonstrates how to use VM introspection and container namespace mapping techniques to provide a "touchless", "out-of-band" and "always-on" cloud operational visibility service that is built into the platform. Cloud users simply register for this service, without worrying about the plumbing, overheads or side effects of gaining visibility into their environments. Cloud operators can leverage this approach to provide deeper operational insights without intervening with user environment, thus enabling a new set of cloud operational analytics as a service that are always on and available with the push of a button. In the second part of this talk, Isci discusses how to leverage this seamless, deep visibility today for building cloud-native operational analytics services for security, compliance, system discovery and misconfiguration analysis. Last, he presents some of the open problems and some upcoming research directions. Speaker Bio: Canturk Isci is a researcher and master inventor in IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he also leads the Cloud Monitoring, Operational and Devops Analytics team. He currently works on introspection-based monitoring techniques to provide deep and seamless operational visibility into cloud instances, and using this deep visibility to develop novel operational and DevOps analytics for cloud. His research interests include operational visibility, analytics and security in cloud, virtualization, data center energy and thermal management, microarchitectural and system-level techniques for energy-efficient and adaptive computing. Prior to IBM Research, Canturk was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware, where he worked on distributed resource and power management. He received best paper awards for his work in IC2E 2014 and ICAC 2011 and a best research poster in VMworld 2008. Canturk has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Bilkent University, an M.Sc. with Distinction in VLSI System Design from University of Westminster, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Princeton University.