Architecture of a Flexible and Cost-Effective Remote Code Execution Engine

Abstract: Oftentimes, there is a need to experiment with different programming languages and technologies when designing software applications. Such experiments must be reproducible and share-able within a team workplace, and manual effort should be minimized for setting up/tearing down said experiments. This paper solves this problem by presenting a cloud-based web service for remote code execution, that is easily extensible to support any number of programming languages and libraries. The service provides a fast, reproducible solution for small software experiments and is amenable to collaboration in a workplace (via sharable permalinks). The service is designed as a distributed system to reliably support a large number of users, and efficiently manage cloud-hosting costs with predictive auto-scaling while minimizing SLA violations.