A Scalability Service for Dynamic Web Applications

Providers of dynamicWeb applications are currently unable to accommodate heavy usage without significant investment in infrastructure and in-house management capability. Our goal is to develop technology to enable a third party to offer scalability as a subscription service with “per-click” pricing to application providers. To this end we have developed a prototype proxy caching system able to scale delivery of dynamic Web content to a large number of users. In this paper we report initial positive results obtained from our prototype that point to the feasibility of our goal. We also report the shortcomings of our current prototype, the chief one being the lack of a scalable method of managing data consistency. We then present our initial work on a novel approach to scalable consistency management. Our approach is based on a fully distributed mechanism that does not require content providers to assist in managing the consistency of remotely cached data. Finally, we describe our ongoing efforts to characterize the inherent tradeoff between scalability and data secrecy, a crucial issue in environments shared by multiple organizations.