Title: Analytics of resource transients in cloud-based applications

Authors: Imre Kocsis; András Pataricza; Zoltán Micskei; András Kövi; Zsolt Kocsis

Addresses: Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Magyar tudósok krt. 2, Budapest, Hungary ' Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Magyar tudósok krt. 2, Budapest, Hungary ' Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Magyar tudósok krt. 2, Budapest, Hungary ' Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Magyar tudósok krt. 2, Budapest, Hungary ' IBM Budapest Centre for Advanced Studies, Neumann J. u. 1, Budapest, Hungary

Abstract: Guaranteeing QoS of services deployed in clouds is a key issue in cloud environments. Cloud services rely heavily on sharing resources between tenants; users have only partial knowledge and control of them. Limited observability and controllability make guaranteeing QoS a challenging task. Many important classic approaches to QoS assurance cannot be adopted, as for a tenant resource arbitration is a black box. Unexpected changes in resource allowance and characteristics introduce novel risks for demanding applications, most importantly soft real-time ones. We introduce the concept of application-integrated early warning sensors - 'mystery shoppers' - to increase the observability of the platform performability state. Mystery shoppers are special, continuously running benchmarks that run as low footprint applications. They deliver fine-grained reports by simulating application resource usage and measuring platform characteristics. This enables inferring the hidden resource sharing characteristics of public clouds. The derived metrics can aid deployment planning and control application-level fault tolerance mechanisms.

Keywords: cloud computing; cloud performance; cloud benchmarking; mystery shoppers; resource transients; cloud-based applications; QoS; quality assurance; quality of service; cloud services; early warning sensors; hidden resource sharing; public clouds; deployment planning; deployment control; fault tolerance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCC.2013.055267

International Journal of Cloud Computing, 2013 Vol.2 No.2/3, pp.191 - 212

Published online: 28 Feb 2014 *

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