Agile dynamic provisioning of multi-tier Internet applications

Dynamic capacity provisioning is a useful technique for handling the multi-time-scale variations seen in Internet workloads. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic provisioning technique for multi-tier Internet applications that employs (i) a flexible queuing model to determine how much resources to allocate to each tier of the application, and (ii) a combination of predictive and reactive methods that determine when to provision these resources, both at large and small time scales. We propose a novel data center architecture based on virtual machine monitors to reduce provisioning overheads. Our experiments on a forty-machine Linux-based hosting platform demonstrate the responsiveness of our technique in handling dynamic workloads. In one scenario where a flash crowd caused the workload of a three-tier application to double, our technique was able to double the application capacity within five minutes, thus maintaining response time targets. Our technique also reduced the overhead...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TAAS
• Authors: Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Prashant J. Shenoy, Abhishek Chandra, Pawan Goyal, Timothy Wood
• Keywords: Dynamic Provisioning Technique, Flexible Queuing Model, Provisioning, TAAS 2008