AppPot: bridging the Grid and Cloud worlds

This paper presents AppPot, a system for creating Linux software appliances. AppPot appliances can be run as a regular batch or grid job and executed in user space, and require no virtualization support in the infrastructure. The main design goal of AppPot is to bring the benefits of a virtualization-based IaaS cloud to existing batch-oriented computing infrastructures. In particular, AppPot addresses the application deployment and configuration on large heterogeneous computing infrastructures: users are able to prepare their own customized virtual appliance to provide a safe execution environment for their applications. These appliances can then be executed on virtually any computing infrastructure, being it a private or public cloud, as well as any batch-queueing compute cluster. We give an overview of AppPot and its features, the technology that makes it possible, and briefly report on experiences running it in production use within the Swiss national grid infrastructure SMSCG.