μlibCloud: Providing high available and uniform accessing to multiple cloud storages

The increasing popularity of cloud storage services attracts large amounts of companies to store their data in cloud instead of building their own infrastructures. With large amounts of data stored in the cloud, it is expected to provide high availability and fine global access experiences. However, there are still major concerns of the availability of major cloud services, especially in a sparsely connected global network with complicated issues. In this paper, we introduce μLibCloud, a system based on Apache libCloud, aiming to improve the availability and global access experience of clouds, and to tolerate provider failures and outages. μLibCloud works as a library at client side, transparently spreading and collecting data smartly to/from different cloud providers through erasure code. In evaluation, we deployed the system into 7 major cloud providers and run a global benchmarks from 9 locations around the world. The results were compared to the original clouds and a content delivery network. We observed that μLibCloud achieved a higher and more uniformed read availability in most cases, with reasonable estimated extra costs. For example, the read latency of some original providers could be reduced by 50%-70% at different locations.