Building Systems of Systems with Escher

Abstract

This paper presents Escher, an approach to build and deploy multi-tiered cloud-based applications, and outlines the framework that supports it. Escher is designed to allow systems of systems to be derived methodically and to evolve over time, in a modular way. To this end, Escher includes (i) a novel authenticated message bus that hides from one another the low-level implementation details of different tiers of a distributed system; and (ii) general purpose wrappers that take an implementation of an application and deploy, for example, a sharded or replicated version of an application automatically.