Hybris: Robust Hybrid Cloud Storage

Besides well-known benefits, commodity cloud storage also raises concerns that include security, reliability, and consistency. We present Hybris key-value store, the first robust hybrid cloud storage system, aiming at addressing these concerns leveraging both private and public cloud resources.

Hybris robustly replicates metadata on trusted private premises (private cloud), separately from data which is dispersed (using replication or erasure coding) across multiple untrusted public clouds. Hybris maintains metadata stored on private premises at the order of few dozens of bytes per key, avoiding the scalability bottleneck at the private cloud. In turn, the hybrid design allows Hybris to efficiently and robustly tolerate cloud outages, but also potential malice in clouds without overhead. Namely, to tolerate up to f malicious clouds, in the common case of the Hybris variant with data replication, writes replicate data across f + 1 clouds, whereas reads involve a single cloud. In the worst case, only up to f additional clouds are used. This is considerably better than earlier multi-cloud storage systems that required costly 3f + 1 clouds to mask f potentially malicious clouds. Finally, Hybris leverages strong metadata consistency to guarantee to Hybris applications strong data consistency without any modifications to the eventually consistent public clouds.

We implemented Hybris in Java and evaluated it using a series of micro and macrobenchmarks. Our results show that Hybris significantly outperforms comparable multi-cloud storage systems and approaches the performance of bare-bone commodity public cloud storage.