Migrating resources is a useful tool for balancing load in a distributed system, but it is difficult to determine when to move resources, where to move resources, and how much of them to move. We look at resource migration for file system metadata and show how CephFS's dynamic subtree partitioning approach can exploit varying degrees of locality and balance because it can partition the namespace into variable sized units. Unfortunately, the current metadata balancer is complicated and difficult to control because it struggles to address many of the general resource migration challenges inherent to the metadata management problem. To help decouple policy from mechanism, we introduce a programmable storage system that lets the designer inject custom balancing logic. We show the flexibility and transparency of this approach by replicating the strategy of a state-of-the-art metadata balancer and conclude by comparing this strategy to other custom balancers on the same system.

Over recent years there has been increased level of discussion on utility pricing for software. The focus of these discussions is to create new operating cost models where the unit costs are directly tied to the business operations to which they contribute. While creating a fine-grained operating cost model is very important for software solutions such as SaaS, the anticipated technology platforms will need to rely on a set of security mechanisms in order to provide a secure and trustworthy service consumption environment. We present an architecture for secure enterprise services consumption management system and a protocol for secure service consumption for service-oriented technology platforms. Our approach is performance sensitive and utilizes a novel combination of asymmetric and symmetric cryptography, and capability based access control. Access to technology platform services is regulated based on the permissions encoded in cryptographic capability tokens. In this paper we report a work in progress.

Dynamic scripting languages such as Ruby provide language features that enable developers to express their intent more rapidly and with fewer expressions. Organizations started using these languages in order to add enhancements to their existing applications or create composite applications. Current research has not yet addressed how security specification and enforcement can be done for scripting based application development. To fill this gap, we developed a framework for the design and facilitation of security. Our approach enables a business oriented application developer to add high-level security intentions to his business process model. The framework supports the automatic generation of security configuration and enforcement. As a proof-of-concept, we present an architecture and report the implementation status.

In today's global economy, companies are challenged to become more efficient and agile in the face of increased transparency in their supply chains and rising compliance requirements. In addition, IT hardware continues to increase in price and performance resulting in more information storage, processing capabilities and network throughput. In fact, by the year 2010 we could see over 100 cores per server with multiple terabytes of memory.