Workload Patterns for Quality-driven Dynamic Cloud Service Configuration and
Auto-Scaling
Li Zhang, Yichuan Zhang
Software College
Northeastern University
Shenyang, China
{zhangl,zhangyc}@swc.neu.edu.cn
Pooyan Jamshidi, Lei Xu, Claus Pahl
IC4 / School of Computing,
Dublin City University
Dublin, Ireland
{pjamshidi,lxu,cpahl}@computing.dcu.ie
Abstract— Cloud service providers negotiate SLAs for cus-
tomer services they offer based on the reliability of performance
and availability of their lower-level platform infrastructure.
While availability management is more mature, performance
management is less reliable. In order to support an iterative
approach that supports the initial static infrastructure configura-
tion as well as dynamic reconfiguration and auto-scaling, an
accurate and efficient solution is required. We propose a predic-
tion-based technique that combines a pattern matching approach
with a traditional collaborative filtering solution to meet the
accuracy and efficiency requirements. Service workload patterns
abstract common infrastructure workloads from monitoring logs
and act as a part of a first-stage high-performant configuration
mechanism before more complex traditional methods are consid-
ered. This enhances current reactive rule-based scalability ap-
proaches and basic prediction techniques based on for example
exponential smoothing.
Keywords-Quality of Service, Cloud Configuration, Auto-
scaling, Web and Cloud Services, QoS Prediction, Workload Pat-
tern Mining, Collaborative Filtering.
I. INTRODUCTION
Quality of Service (QoS) is the basis of web and cloud
service configuration management and deployment [1,2].
Cloud service providers (CSPs) – whether at infrastructure,
platform or software level – provide quality guarantees usually
in terms of availability and performance to their customers in
the form of service-level agreements (SLAs) [4]. Internally, the
respective service configuration in terms of available resources
then needs to make sure that the SLA obligations are met [10].
To facilitate SLA conformance, virtual machines (VMs) can be
configured and scaled up/down in terms of CPU cores and
memory, deployed with storage and network capabilities.
Some current cloud infrastructure solutions allow users to de-
fine rules manually to scale up or down to maintain perfor-
mance levels.
QoS like service performance in terms of response time or
availability may vary depending on network, service execution
environment and user requirements, making it hard for
providers to choose an initial configuration and scale this
up/down to maintain the SLA guarantees, but also optimising
resource utilisation at the same time. We utilise QoS prediction
techniques here, but rather than bottom-up predicting QoS
from monitored infrastructure metrics [12,13,25], we reverse
the idea, resulting in a novel technique for pattern-based
resource configuration. We extract service workload patterns
(SWPs) that correspond to typical workloads of the
infrastructure and map these to QoS values. A pattern consists
of narrow range of metrics measured for each infrastructure
concern such as compute, storage and network under which the
QoS concern is stable. In a top-down approach, we then take a
QoS requirement and determine suitable workload-oriented
configurations that maintain required values. Furthermore, we
enhance this with a cost-based selection function, applicable if
many candidate configurations emerge.
We specifically look at performance as the QoS concern
here since dealing with availability in cloud environments is
considered as easier to achieve, but performance is currently
neglected in practice due to less mature resource management
techniques [10]. We introduce pattern detection mechanisms
and, based on a QoS-SWP matrix, we define SWP workload
configurations for required QoS. The accuracy of the solution
to guarantee that the chosen (initially predicted) resource
configurations meet the QoS requirements is of utmost
importance. An appropriate scaling approach is required in
order to allow this to be utilised in dynamic environments. In
this paper, we show that the pattern-based approach improves
the efficiency of the solution in comparison with traditional
prediction approaches, e.g. based on collaborative filtering.
This enhance existing solutions by automating current manual
rule-based reactive scalability mechanisms and also advances
prediction approaches for QoS, making them applicable in the
cloud with its accuracy and performance requirements.
Section II outlines the solution and justifies its practical
relevance. Section III introduces SWPs and how they can be
derived. Section IV discusses the selection of patterns as
workload specifications for resource configuration. The
application of the solution for SLA-compliant cloud resource
configuration is described in Section V. Section VI contains an
evaluation in terms of accuracy and performance of the
solution and Section VII contains a discussion of related work.
II. A
PPROACH OUTLINE -QUALITY-DRIVEN
CONFIGURATION AND SCALING
We now briefly discuss the state-of-the-art in cloud
resource configuration and its relevance to the solution . An
SLA is typically defined based on availability. Customers
expect that the services they acquire will be always available.
Thus, providers usually make extensive claims here. The
consensus in the industry is that cloud computing providers
generally have solutions to manage availability. Response time
2014 IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing
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DOI
156