Using Global Behavior Modeling to Improve QoS in Cloud Data Storage Services

The cloud computing model aims to make large-scale data-intensive computing affordable even for users with limited financial resources, that cannot invest into expensive infrastructures necesssary to run them. In this context, MapReduce is emerging as a highly scalable programming paradigm that enables high-throughput data-intensive processing as a cloud service. Its performance is highly dependent on the underlying storage service, responsible to efficiently support massively parallel data accesses by guaranteeing a high throughput under heavy access concurrency. In this context, quality of service plays a crucial role: the storage service needs to sustain a stable throughput for each individual accesss, in addition to achieving a high aggregated throughput under concurrency. In this paper we propose a technique to address this problem using component monitoring, application-side feedback and behavior pattern analysis to automatically infer useful knowledge about the causes of poor quality of service and provide an easy way to reason in about potential improvements. We apply our proposal to Blob Seer, a representative data storage service specifically designed to achieve high aggregated throughputs and show through extensive experimentation substantial improvements in the stability of individual data read accesses under MapReduce workloads.