QoS Guarantees and Service Differentiation for Dynamic Cloud Applications

Cloud elasticity allows dynamic resource provisioning in concert with actual application demands. Feedback control approaches have been applied with success to resource allocation in physical servers. However, cloud dynamics make the design of an accurate and stable resource controller challenging, especially when application-level performance is considered as the measured output. Application-level performance is highly dependent on the characteristics of workload and sensitive to cloud dynamics. To address these challenges, we extend a self-tuning fuzzy control (STFC) approach, originally developed for response time assurance in web servers to resource allocation in virtualized environments. We introduce mechanisms for adaptive output amplification and flexible rule selection in the STFC approach for better adaptability and stability. Based on the STFC, we further design a two-layer QoS provisioning framework, DynaQoS, that supports adaptive multi-objective resource allocation and service differentiation. We implement a prototype of DynaQoS on a Xen-based cloud testbed. Experimental results on representative server workloads show that STFC outperforms popular controllers such as Kalman filter, ARMA and, Adaptive PI in the control of CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth resources under both static and dynamic workloads. Further results with multiple control objectives and service classes demonstrate the effectiveness of DynaQoS in performance-power control and service differentiation.