People

Dan Williams (Cornell University)

Hani Jamjoom (IBM Watson Research)

The tech giant Microsoft is testing its Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) integration with Xbox consoles. Alpha Skip-Ahead and Alpha rings will be able to access the xCloud integration now. The new integration brings sort of a ‘trial’ feature for the video games. The users can easily test or play the demo video before purchasing the game. Feb 15, 2021 xCloud articles on MacRumors.com. Microsoft has announced that following beta testing for a small group of users, it plans to launch its xCloud game streaming service on Apple devices via Safari. Project xCloud was the name of our public cloud gaming technology preview and was the first chapter of a multi-year journey. As we prepare for the next chapter of our journey, we are closing registration to Project xCloud (Preview) starting 31 August, and will formally close the public preview starting on 29 September 2021. HostMyApple is the #1 Provider of macOS Big Sur Cloud Servers! With up to 32GB of RAM and high speed SSD storage, HostMyApple offers powerful and affordable MacOS cloud VPS and dedicated hosting options. With no hardware to purchase, running your own macOS server is an easy choice for anyone looking to run iMessage in the cloud, AirMessage.

Hakim Weatherspoon (Cornell University)

Past Collaborators

Eslam Elnikety (KAUST)

Mohamed Eldehiry (KAUST)

Hai Huang (IBM Watson Research)

Overview

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds are evolving from offering simple on-demand resources to providing diverse sets of tightly-coupled monolithic services. Like OS kernels of the 1980's and 1990's, these monolithic offerings, albeit rich in features, are significantly constraining users' freedom and control over the underlying---cloud---resources. For example, we are unaware of a true hybrid cloud, where its users can migrate virtual machines freely across clouds. This paper argues for a new type of IaaS cloud, an xCloud, that builds on ideas from extensible OSs to give users the flexibility to install custom cloud extensions, which can address the limitations outlined above. We describe the design space for xClouds, including a practical approach for transforming today's public clouds into xClouds.

Code Release

Xbox Cloud Gaming On Ios

Code to transform public clouds into xClouds is now available! The release consists of patches for Xen and Blanket drivers for Linux. Begin by downloading the tarball at http://code.google.com/p/xen-blanket/, and check out the README for instructions of how to run Xen inside your own EC2 instance!

Publications

Dan Williams, Hani Jamjoom, and Hakim Weatherspoon. The Xen-Blanket: Virtualize Once, Run Everywhere. In Proceedings of ACM EuroSys, Bern, Switzerland, April 2012.

Xbox Xcloud Mac

Dan Williams, Eslam Elnikety, Mohamed Eldehiry, Hani Jamjoom, Hai Huang, and Hakim Weatherspoon. Unshackle the Cloud! In Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), Portland, OR, June 2011.