How to Supercharge the Amazon T2: Observations and Suggestions

Cloud service providers adopt a credit system to allow users to obtain periods of performance bursts without additional cost. For example, the Amazon EC2 T2 instance offers low baseline performance and the capability to achieve short periods of high performance using CPU credits. Once a T2 instance is created and assigned some initial credits, while its CPU utilization is above the baseline threshold, there is a transient period where performance is boosted and the assigned CPU credits are used. After all credits are used, the maximum achievable performance drops to baseline. Credits accrue periodically, when the instance utilization is below the baseline threshold. This paper proposes a methodology to increase the performance benefits of T2 by seamlessly extending the duration of the transient period while maintaining high performance. This extension of the high performance transient period is combined with proactive migration to further take advantage of the initially assigned credits. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the benefits of this methodology for both single-tier and multi-tier applications.