Service Oriented File Systems

Abstract

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are a loose coupling of network services providing methods for systems development and integration. Interoperability between different systems and programming languages is provided via communication protocols and well defined messages. The recent development trend has been to favor RESTful approaches for these interfaces, which encode relevant context and semantic metadata into the URL of an HTTP GET or PUT operation.

We observe that this approach is essentially a sim- plified web-instantiation of synthetic file system based service interfaces, such as those originally pioneered by UNIX and later the Plan 9 and Inferno operating sys- tems. In this paper we advocate the collapse of the software stack by abstracting the underlying transport and naming details, and accessing RESTful services via standard file system interfaces. We explore the research challenges and opportunities presented by taking such an approach to building comprehensive dynamic dis- tributed systems appropriate for large scale cloud com- puting.

Cite as:

Eric Van Hensbergen, Noah Evans, and Phillip Stanley-Marbell. Service Oriented File Systems. Tech. rep. IBM Research, 2009.

BibTeX

@techreport{van2009service,
title={Service Oriented File Systems},
author={Van Hensbergen, Eric and Evans, Noah and Stanley-Marbell, Phillip},
institution={IBM Research},
year={2009},
month={April},
note={URL: https://dominoweb.draco.res.ibm.com/eb508fa066258c3d852575a70057baf0.html}
}