Adaptive, Model-driven Autoscaling for Cloud Applications

Applications with a dynamic workload demand need access to a flexible infrastructure to meet performance guarantees and minimize resource costs. While cloud computing provides the elasticity to scale the infrastructure on demand, cloud service providers lack control and visibility of user space applications, making it difficult to accurately scale the underlying infrastructure. Thus, the burden of scaling falls on the user.

In this paper, we propose a new cloud service, Dependable Compute Cloud (DC2), that automatically scales the infrastructure to meet the user-specified performance requirements. DC2 employs Kalman filtering to automatically learn the (possibly changing) system parameters for each application, allowing it to proactively scale the infrastructure to meet performance guarantees. DC2 is designed for the cloud - it is application-agnostic and does not require any offline application profiling or benchmarking. Our implementation results on OpenStack using a multi-tier application under a range of workload traces demonstrate the robustness and superiority of DC2 over existing rule-based approaches.