Biblio

The public cloud is moving to a Platform-as-a-Service model where services such as data management, machine learning or image classification are provided by the cloud operator while applications are written in high-level languages and leverage these services. Managed languages such as Java, Python or Scala are widely used in this setting. However, while these languages can increase productivity, they are often associated with problems such as unpredictable garbage collection pauses or warm-up overheads. We argue that the reason for these problems is that current language runtime systems were not initially designed for the cloud setting. To address this, we propose seven tenets for designing future language runtime systems for cloud data centers. We then outline the design of a general substrate for building such runtime systems, based on these seven tenets.