Managing Service Performance in the Cassandra Distributed Storage System

In this paper we describe the architecture of a quality-of-service (QoS) infrastructure for achieving controlled application performance over the Cassandra distributed storage system. We present an implementation of our architecture and provide results from an evaluation using the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) on the Amazon EC2 Cloud. A key focus of this paper is on a QoS-aware measurement-driven provisioning methodology. Our evaluation provides evidence that the methodology is effective in estimating application resource requirements and thus in achieving the type of controlled performance required by data intensive performance-critical applications. While our architecture is implemented and evaluated in the context of the Cassandra distributed storage system, its principles are general and can be applied to a variety of NoSQL systems.