CSAL: A Cloud Storage Abstraction Layer to Enable Portable Cloud Applications

One of the large impediments for adoption of cloud computing is perceived vendor lock-in with respect to both low-level resource management and application-level storage services. Application portability is essential to both avoid lock-in as well as leverage the ever-changing landscape of cloud offerings. We present a storage abstraction layer to enable applications to both utilize the highly-available and scalable storage services provided by cloud vendors and be portable across platforms. The abstraction layer, called CSAL, provides Blob, Table, and Queue abstractions across multiple providers and presents applications with an integrated namespace thereby relieving applications of having to manage storage entity location information and access credentials. Overall, we have observed minimal overhead of CSAL on both EC2 and Windows Azure.