FSaaS: Configuring Policies for Managing Shared Files Among Cooperating, Distributed Applications

In this paper, the authors introduce and describe the concept of File System as a Services (FSaaS), an highly configurable cloud service that enables cooperating, distributed applications to define their own rules and policies for managing sets of files shared. The FSaaS aims to create a logical virtual space, containing references to shared files, whose management layer supports the same functionalities of a file system (basic file operations) but where each single file can have different policies for consistency, synchronization and replication. This work explains the idea at the base of FSaaS, describes in details its main components and their interactions and illustrates two use cases for better explaining the provided functionalities.