Coordinating CPU and Memory Elasticity Controllers to Meet Service Response Time Constraints

Vertical elasticity is recognized as a key enabler for efficient resource utilization of cloud infrastructure through fine-grained resource provisioning, e.g., allowing CPU cycles to be leased for as short as a few seconds. However, little research has been done to support vertical elasticity where the focus is mostly on a single resource, either CPU or memory, while an application may need arbitrary combinations of these resources at different stages of its execution. Nonetheless, the existing techniques cannot be readily used as-is without proper orchestration since they may lead to either under-or over-provisioning of resources and consequently result in undesirable behaviors such as performance disparity. The contribution of this paper is the design of an autonomic resource controller using a fuzzy control approach as a coordination technique. The novel controller dynamically adjusts the right amount of CPU and memory required to meet the performance objective of an application, namely its response time. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation using three different interactive benchmark applications, RUBiS, RUBBoS, and Olio, under workload traces generated based on open and closed system models. The results show that the coordination of memory and CPU elasticity controllers using the proposed fuzzy control provisions the right amount of resources to meet the response time target without over-committing any of the resource types. In contrast, with no coordinating between controllers, the behaviour of the system is unpredictable e.g., the application performance may be met but at the expense of over-provisioning of one of the resources, or application crashing due to severe resource shortage as a result of conflicting decisions.