Maximum Sustainable throughput Prediction for Data Stream Processing over Public Clouds

In cloud-based stream processing services, the maximum sustainable throughput (MST) is defined as the maximum throughput that a system composed of a fixed number of virtual machines (VMs) can ingest indefinitely. If the incoming data rate exceeds the system's MST, unprocessed data accumulates, eventually making the system inoperable. Thus, it is important for the service provider to keep the MST always larger than the incoming data rate by dynamically changing the number of VMs used by the system. In this paper, we identify a common data processing environment used by modern data stream processing systems, and we propose MST prediction models for this environment. We train the models using linear regression with samples obtained from a few VMs and predict MST for a larger number of VMs. To minimize the time and cost for model training, we statistically determine a set of training samples using Intel's Storm benchmarks with representative resource usage patterns. Using typical use-case benchmarks on Amazon's EC2 public cloud, our experiments show that, training with up to 8 VMs, we can predict MST for streaming applications with less than 4% average prediction error for 12 VMs, 9% for 16 VMs, and 32% for 24 VMs. Further, we evaluate our prediction models with simulation based elastic VM scheduling on a realistic workload. These simulation results show that with 10% over provisioning, our proposed models' cost efficiency is on par with the cost of an optimal scaling policy without incurring any service level agreement violations.