1 Involuntary Computing: Hacking the Cloud

In this short wild and crazy paper we argue that cloud computing has a lot to learn from current cybercriminals who plague the internet with botnets, malware, viruses and extort money from all of us. We present basic distributed systems designs with a view of a hacker and argue that the same designs can be and are indeed used in cloud computing. Decentralized scheduling, network overlay, heterogneous and intermittent resources, redundancy of task execution and asynchronous messaging. All of it via secure channels and using the most widely used protocol http. With this angle we present Kestrel, a job scheduling framework built using XMPP messaging and customized for cloud resources. Our results show that Kestrel scales well over tens of thousands of nodes and we envision a one million agents deployment soon. Finally, we also argue that a botnet is the cheapest cloud with a reported $200 a week for 6,000 cores.