Forecasting Cloud Application Workloads With CloudInsight for Predictive Resource Management

Predictive cloud resource management has been widely adopted to overcome the limitations of reactive cloud autoscaling. The predictive resource management is highly relying on workload predictors, which estimate short-/long-term fluctuations of cloud application workloads. These predictors tend to be pre-optimized for specific workload patterns. However, such predictors are still insufficient to handle real-world cloud workloads whose patterns may be unknown a priori, may dynamically change over time and may be irregular. As a result, these predictors often cause over-/under-provisioning of cloud resources. To address this problem, we have created CloudInsight, a novel cloud workload prediction framework, leveraging the combined power of multiple workload predictors. CloudInsight creates an ensemble model using multiple predictors to make accurate predictions for real workloads. The weights of the predictors in CloudInsight are determined at runtime with their accuracy for the current workload using multi-class regression. The ensemble model is periodically optimized to handle sudden changes in the workload. We evaluated CloudInsight with various real workload traces. The results show that CloudInsight has 13–27 percent higher accuracy than state-of-the-art predictors. Moreover, the results from trace-based simulations with a cloud resource manager show that CloudInsight has 15–20 percent less under-/over-provisioning periods, resulting in high cost-efficiency and low SLA violations.