The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back: Safe Cloud Overbooking with Application Brownout

Resource overbooking is an admission control technique to increase utilization in cloud environments. However, due to uncertainty about future application workloads, overbooking may result in overload situations and deteriorated performance. We mitigate this using brownout, a feedback approach to application performance steering, that ensures graceful degradation during load spikes and thus avoids overload. Additionally, brownout management information is included into the overbooking system, enabling the development of improved reactive methods to overload situations. Our combined brownout-overbooking approach is evaluated based on real-life interactive workloads and non-interactive batch applications. The results show that our approach achieves an improvement of resource utilization of 11 to 37 percentage points, while keeping response times lower than the set target of 1 second, with negligible application degradation.