Enhancing OpenStack clouds using P2P technologies

Abstract: It was known for a long time that OpenStack has issues with scalability. Peer-to-Peer systems, on the other hand, have proven to scale well without significant reduction of performance. The objectives of this thesis are to study the challenges associated with P2P-enhanced clouds and present solutions for overcoming them. As a case study, we take the architecture of the P2P-enhanced OpenStack implemented at Ericsson that uses the CYCLON P2Pprotocol. We study the OpenStack architecture and P2P technologies and finally propose solutions and provide possibilities in addressing the challenges that are faced by P2P-enhanced OpenStack clouds. We emphasize mainly on a decentralized identity service and management of Virtual machine images. This work also investigates the characterization of P2P architectures for their use in P2P-enhanced OpenStack clouds. The results section shows that the proposed solution enables the existing P2P system to scale beyond what was originally possible. We also show that the P2P-enhanced system performs better than the standard OpenStack.