1. ZeroCloud Overview¶
ZeroCloud is a converged cloud storage and compute platform, powered by OpenStack Swift and ZeroVM. It combines the massively scalable object storage capabilities of Swift with the application isolation of ZeroVM to create a platform for developing cloud applications.
The key concept of ZeroCloud is data-local computation: instead of pushing and pull data between the data storage nodes and computation nodes, we send the application to the data and do the work the in-place on the storage system. Another way to think about it: it’s like stored procedures (for a relational database), but much more powerful and scalable.
1.1. Use cases¶
Not all types of applications are suitable for the ZeroCloud platform. The only real data persistence mechanism available is OpenStack Swift object storage, which is eventually consistent. This makes ZeroCloud most suitable for highly-available and partition-tolerant applications which process a lot of data.
Here are some types of applications which are a good match for ZeroCloud:
- MapReduce (searching, sorting, analytics, etc.)
- Batch processing (logs, images, etc.)
- File server/repository applications
ZeroCloud also provides tools for easily building REST services for your applications.
1.2. Language support¶
Currently, you can only write applications for ZeroCloud using Python and C/C++. This limitation comes from the ZeroVM execution environment, which requires applications to be cross-compiled to NaCl for validation and secure execution.
The recommended development language for ZeroCloud is Python. Python 2.7.3 has been ported to NaCl and is available to use on ZeroVM and ZeroCloud. See https://github.com/zerovm/zpython2.