The Importance of Being OS-aware - In Performance Aspects of Cloud Computing Research

This paper highlights inefficiencies in modern cloud infrastructures due to a distance between the research on high-level cloud management / orchestration and the research on low-level kernel and hypervisor mechanisms. Our position about this issue is that more research is needed to make these two worlds talk to each other, providing richer abstractions to describe the low-level mechanisms and automatically map higher-level descriptions and abstractions to configuration and performance tuning options available within operating systems and kernels (both host and guest), as well as hypervisors.