Optimized application placement for network congestion and failure resiliency in clouds

We propose OX, a runtime system that shields applications from network congestion and failures, in shared Cloud data centers. OX enables customers to deploy network intensive data analytics frameworks within existing infrastructures, by protecting co-hosted QoS-constrained applications from network interference and performance degradation. Moreover, OX reduces application vulnerability to hardware failures, such as rack power outages, for all applications. OX discovers application topologies by monitoring network traffic among application components (virtual machines), transparently. In addition, OX allows application owners to specify groups of highly available virtual machines, following component roles and replication semantics. Based on this information, OX builds on-line topology graphs for applications and incrementally partitions these graphs across the infrastructure to optimize communication between virtual machines and enforce availability constraints. We show the benefits of OX in a realistic shared Cloud data center setting using a mix of Hadoop and YCSB/Cassandra workloads.