MCon: Building an Elastic Cloud for Android Applications with Framework Consolidation

Abstract

Cloud execution of mobile apps—running unmodified apps inside full mobile OSes on commodity servers—is gaining adoption for uses such as GUI agent training and large-scale app testing. These workloads are both temporally dynamic (from second-scale agent interactions to hour-long tests) and highly bursty (up to hundreds of concurrent jobs), demanding an elastic platform that can provision mobile environments both quickly and at high density. Existing stacks fall short because each tenant has a separate copy of the mobile framework (a large collection of shared libraries and system services), which is slow to start and heavy to keep. We present MCon, the first container system with the framework consolidation architecture: the framework is run as a shared, multi-tenant service instead of a per-tenant component. The core challenge is to practically enable per-tenant isolation on a large framework with no native multi-tenant support. MCon achieves this from outside the framework: we virtualize the IPC control path through which apps access shared framework services, and combine it with per-tenant virtual device slices to construct private views of framework and device resources. Compared to the best existing stacks, MCon achieves sub-second cold tenant allocation (15× as fast), with 70%-82% less host memory and 1%-33% less GPU memory usage. MCon has been adopted by Infinigence AI.