Ewnetu Bayuh Lakew

A Cloud Environment for Data-intensive Storage Services

The emergence of cloud environments has made feasible the delivery of Internet-scale services by addressing a number of challenges such as live migration, fault tolerance and quality of service. However, current approaches do not tackle key issues related to cloud storage, which are of increasing importance given the enormous amount of data being produced in todays rich digital environment (e.g. by smart phones, social networks, sensors, user generated content). In this paper we present the architecture of a scalable and flexible cloud environment addressing the challenge of providing data-intensive storage cloud services through raising the abstraction level of storage, enabling data mobility across providers, allowing computational and content-centric access to storage and deploying new data-oriented mechanisms for QoS and security guarantees. We also demonstrate the added value and effectiveness of the proposed architecture through two real-life application scenarios from the healthcare and media domains.

Towards Faster Response Time Models for Vertical Elasticity

Resource provisioning in cloud computing is typically coarse-grained. For example, entire CPU cores may be allocated for periods of up to an hour. The Resource-as-a-Service cloud concept has been introduced to improve the efficiency of resource utilization in clouds. In this concept, resources are allocated in terms of CPU core fractions, with granularities of seconds. Such infrastructures could be created using existing technologies such as lightweight virtualization using LXC or by exploiting the Xen hyper visors capacity for vertical elasticity. However, performance models for determining how much capacity to allocate to each application are currently lacking. To address this deficit, we evaluate two performance models for predicting mean response times: the previously proposed queue length model and the novel inverse model. The models are evaluated using 3 applications under both open and closed system models. The inverse model reacted rapidly and remained stable even with targets as low as 0.5 seconds.

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.

A hybrid cloud controller for vertical memory elasticity

Web-facing applications are expected to provide certain performance guarantees despite dynamic and continuous workload changes. As a result, application owners are using cloud computing as it offers the ability to dynamically provision computing resources (e.g., memory, CPU) in response to changes in workload demands to meet performance targets and eliminates upfront costs. Horizontal, vertical, and the combination of the two are the possible dimensions that cloud application can be scaled in terms of the allocated resources. In vertical elasticity as the focus of this work, the size of virtual machines (VMs) can be adjusted in terms of allocated computing resources according to the runtime workload. A commonly used vertical resource elasticity approach is realized by deciding based on resource utilization, named capacity-based. While a new trend is to use the application performance as a decision making criterion, and such an approach is named performance-based. This paper discusses these two approaches and proposes a novel hybrid elasticity approach that takes into account both the application performance and the resource utilization to leverage the benefits of both approaches. The proposed approach is used in realizing vertical elasticity of memory (named as vertical memory elasticity), where the allocated memory of the VM is auto-scaled at runtime. To this aim, we use control theory to synthesize a feedback controller that meets the application performance constraints by auto-scaling the allocated memory, i.e., applying vertical memory elasticity. Different from the existing vertical resource elasticity approaches, the novelty of our work lies in utilizing both the memory utilization and application response time as decision making criteria. To verify the resource efficiency and the ability of the controller in handling unexpected workloads, we have implemented the controller on top of the Xen hypervisor and performed a series of experiments using the RUBBoS interactive benchmark application, under synthetic and real workloads including Wikipedia and FIFA. The results reveal that the hybrid controller meets the application performance target with better performance stability (i.e., lower standard deviation of response time), while achieving a high memory utilization (close to 83%), and allocating less memory compared to all other baseline controllers. A feedback controller for vertically scale the memory of cloud applications is proposed.The controller is able to tune the memory in order to meet the desired performance.The application performance and memory utilization are used as decision making criteria.The feedback controller guarantees the stability of the cloud application.The results show the efficiency in memory usage when the feedback controller is used.

Management of distributed resource allocations in multi-cluster environments

We present a fully distributed solution for managing resource allocation for services running across multiple clusters in a large-scale cloud computing environment. Our solution allows individual services running across clusters to compete dynamically for allocations based on their rate of consumption while maintaining the global cloud level allocation limits. The solution monitors resource consumption by services that are spread over a number of clusters. Global polls are triggered only when the allocated balance in a cluster decreases below a threshold and allocations are reassigned in a manner that avoids further immediate global polls. Our solution achieves scalability by minimizing global message exchanges, increases performance by distributing requests, and improves availability by avoiding a single point of failure. We perform a range of simulations to verify the accuracy of our approach, to validate our theoretical results, and to evaluate against competing approaches.

KPI-agnostic Control for Fine-Grained Vertical Elasticity

Applications hosted in the cloud have become indispensable in several contexts, with their performance often being key to business operation and their running costs needing to be minimized. To minimize running costs, most modern virtualization technologies such as Linux Containers, Xen, and KVM offer powerful resource control primitives for individual provisioning – that enable adding or removing of fraction of cores and/or megabytes of memory for as short as few seconds. Despite the technology being ready, there is a lack of proper techniques for fine-grained resource allocation, because there is an inherent challenge in determining the correct composition of resources an application needs, with varying workload, to ensure deterministic performance. This paper presents a control-based approach for the management of multiple resources, accounting for the resource consumption, together with the application performance, enabling fine-grained vertical elasticity. The control strategy ensures that the application meets the target performance indicators, consuming as less resources as possible. We carried out an extensive set of experiments using different applications – interactive with response-time requirements, as well as noninteractive with throughput desires – by varying the workload mixes of each application over time. The results demonstrate that our solution precisely provides guaranteed performance while at the same time avoiding both resource over-and underprovisioning.

A Synchronization Mechanism for Cloud Accounting Systems

In current cloud systems, services run across multiple geographically distributed clusters and continuously generate resource usage data due to constant resource consumption. In the context of accounting, resource usage data generated from each cluster during service runtime must be collected and aggregated into a single cloud-wide record so that a single bill can be created. This paper presents a mechanism to synchronize accounting records among distributed accounting system peers. Run time resource usage generated from different clusters is synchronized to maintain a single cloud-wide view of the data so that a single bill can be created. We provide a set of accounting system requirements and an evaluation which verifies that the solution fulfills these requirements. Experimental results show that our solution produces less overhead in terms of data exchange and scales near-linearly with the size of clusters with no single point of failure.

Service Level and Performance Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation in Overbooked Data Centers

Many cloud computing providers use overbooking to increase their low utilization ratios. This however increases the risk of performance degradation due to interference among co-located VMs. To address this problem we present a service level and performance aware controller that: (1) provides performance isolation for high QoS VMs, and (2) reduces the VM interference between low QoS VMs by dynamically mapping virtual cores to physical cores, thus limiting the amount of resources that each VM can access depending on their performance. Our evaluation based on real cloud applications and both stress, synthetic and realistic workloads demonstrates that a more efficient use of the resources is achieved, dynamically allocating the available capacity to the applications that need it more, which in turn lead to a more stable and predictable performance over time.

A Tree-Based Protocol for Enforcing Quotas in Clouds

Services are increasingly being hosted on cloud nodes to enhance their performance and increase their availability. The virtually unlimited availability of cloud resources enables service owners to consume resources without quantitative restrictions, paying only for what they use. To avoid cost overruns, resource consumption must be controlled and capped when necessary. We present a distributed tree-based protocol for managing quotas in clouds that minimizes communication overheads and reduces the time required to determine whether a quota has been exhausted. Experimental evaluation shows that our protocol reduces communication costs by 42% relative to a distributed baseline solution and is up to 15 times faster.

Resource State Monitoring of Service Transactions in Cloud Systems

In cloud systems, services constituting a transaction may spread over a large number of servers or clusters. Theoretically, these services could consume cloud resources unlimitedly. To avoid financial loss due to resource overuse, clouds have to monitor the state of resources consumed by the services-collect values of consumption, and evaluate whether the combined usage of resources has excessed a pre-defined upper bound or not. The distributed nature of the services introduces a challenge to the monitoring system on how to summarise distributed state information with low cost. We present our resource state monitoring solution to capture the challenge introduced by services hosted in clouds. Our solution tracks the resource consumed by each service constituting a transaction individually whilst ensures the whole transaction does not overuse the allocated resource. It improves availability by avoiding single points of failure, and achieves scalability by minimising message exchanges. We performed experimental analyses that indicate this work can provide an inexpensive resource monitoring solution for transactions in clouds.