Cloud Chamber: A Self-Organizing Facility to Create, Exercise, and Examine Software as a Service Tenants

Cloud Chamber is a test bed for understanding how web services behave as tenants in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment. This work describes the Cloud Chamber test bed to investigate autonomic resource management of web services in a cloud environment. Cloud Chamber is a virtualized environment which provides web servers as services, facilities to apply loads to the tenant services, algorithms for autonomic organization and reconfiguration of service assignments as demand changes, and sensors to capture resource consumption and performance metrics. The test bed inserts sensors into web servers to collect the resource utilization of CPU cycles, memory consumption, and bandwidth consumption of the individual web services, the web server, and the operating system. This high resolution performance data generates profiles of the resource usage of each web service and the resource availability of each server. The test bed, as described in this work, utilizes these profiles to efficiently place services on servers, thus balancing resource consumption, service performance, and service availability. Once services have been placed, the test bed monitors changes such as traffic levels, server churn, and the introduction of new services. The information gathered is used to calculate configurations of service placement which better meet the changing requirements of the environment.