Augmenting Elasticity Controllers for Improved Accuracy

Elastic resource provisioning is used to guarantee service level objectives (SLO) at reduced cost in a Cloud platform. However, performance interference in the hosting platform introduces uncertainty in the performance guarantees of provisioned services. Existing elasticity controllers are either unaware of this interference or over-provision resources to meet the SLO. In this paper, we show that assuming predictable performance of VMs in a multi-tenant environment to scale, will result in long periods of SLO violations. We augment the elasticity controller to be aware of interference and improve the convergence time of scaling without over provisioning. We perform experiments with Memcached and compare our solution against a baseline elasticity controller that is unaware of performance interference. Our results show that augmentation can reduce SLO violations by 65% or more and also save provisioning costs compared to an interference oblivious controller.