Feedback-Control-Based Performance Regulation for Multi-Tenant Applications

The ability to deliver different performance levels based on tenant-specific service level agreements (SLAs) is a key requirement for multi-tenant Internet applications. However, workload variations and extensive resource sharing among tenants make this goal hard to achieve. We address the issue with a performance regulator based on feedback-control. The regulator has a hierarchical structure, with which a high-level controller manages request admission rates to prevent overloading and a low-level controller manages resource allocation for admitted requests to track a specified level of service differentiation between the cohosted tenants. A prototype implementation of the performance regulator based on Tomcat and MySQL is provided and a multi-tenant version of RUBBoS benchmark is used for evaluation. Experimental results indicate that the regulator effectively bounds the response time for each tenant while maintaining high resource utilization levels.