Measuring Cloud Workload Burstiness

Workload burstiness and spikes are among the main reasons for service disruptions and decrease in the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of online services. They are hurdles that complicate autonomic resource management of datacenters. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art in online identification of workload spikes and quantifying burstiness. The applicability of some of the proposed techniques is examined for Cloud systems where various workloads are co-hosted on the same platform. We discuss Sample Entropy (Samp En), a measure used in biomedical signal analysis, as a potential measure for burstiness. A modification to the original measure is introduced to make it more suitable for Cloud workloads.