WebOS: Software Support for Scalable Web Services

The burgeoning popularity of the Web is pushing against the performance limits of the underlying infrastructure, p re- senting a number of difficult challenges for the Webas a sys- tem. We believe that resources such as connectivity, stor- age, computation, latency, and bandwidth are likely to re- main constrained in the future. Thus, we are building a higher level Web operating system to efficiently manage these resources for the benefit of all Web users. Our pro- totype, WebOS, is designed to support highly available, in- crementally scalable, self-tuning, dynamically reconfigur- ing and geographically aware Web services. WebOS in- cludes mechanisms for naming Web services, coherent data replication, efficient distribution of client requests across the wide area, safe execution of arbitrary executables on re - mote sites, and authentication for secure access to Web re- sources.