Nowadays, many enterprises commit to the extraction of actionable knowledge from huge datasets as part of their core business activities. Applications belong to very different domains such as fraud detection or one-to-one marketing, and encompass business analytics and support to decision making in both private and public sectors. In these scenarios, a central place is held by the MapReduce framework and in particular its open source implementation, Apache Hadoop. In such environments, new challenges arise in the area of jobs performance prediction, with the needs to provide Service Level Agreement guarantees to the end-user and to avoid waste of computational resources. In this paper we provide performance analysis models to estimate MapReduce job execution times in * Acknowledgments: This work has received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 644869 (DICE). Experimental data are available as open data at https://zenodo.org/record/58847#.V5i0wmXA45Q. 1Hadoop clusters governed by the YARN Capacity Scheduler. We propose models of increasing complexity and accuracy, ranging from queueing networks to stochastic well formed nets, able to estimate job performance under a number of scenarios of interest, including also unreliable resources. The accuracy of our models is evaluated by considering the TPC-DS industry benchmark running experiments on Amazon EC2 and the CINECA Italian supercomputing center. The results have shown that the average accuracy we can achieve is in the range 9-14%.

Big data analytics have become widespread as a means to extract knowledge from large datasets. Yet, the heterogeneity and irregularity usually associated with big data applications often overwhelm the existing software and hardware infrastructures. In such context, the flexibility and elasticity provided by the cloud computing paradigm offer a natural approach to cost-effectively adapting the allocated resources to the application's current needs. However, these same characteristics impose extra challenges to predicting the performance of cloud-based big data applications, a key step to proper management and planning. This paper explores three modeling approaches for performance prediction of cloud-based big data applications. We evaluate two queuing-based analytical models and a novel fast ad hoc simulator in various scenarios based on different applications and infrastructure setups. The three approaches are compared in terms of prediction accuracy, finding that our best approaches can predict average application execution times with 26% relative error in the very worst case and about 7% on average.

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Big data applications and analytics are employed in many sectors for a variety of goals: improving customers satisfaction, predicting market behavior or improving processes in public health. These applications consist of complex software stacks that are often run on cloud systems. Predicting execution times is important for estimating the cost of cloud services and for effectively managing the underlying resources at runtime. Machine Learning (ML), providing black box solutions to model the relationship between application performance and system configuration without requiring in-detail knowledge of the system, has become a popular way of predicting the performance of big data applications. We investigate the cost-benefits of using supervised ML models for predicting the performance of applications on Spark, one of today's most widely used frameworks for big data analysis. We compare our approach with Ernest (an ML-based technique proposed in the literature by the Spark inventors) on a range of scenarios, application workloads, and cloud system configurations. Our experiments show that Ernest can accurately estimate the performance of very regular applications, but it fails when applications exhibit more irregular patterns and/or when extrapolating on bigger data set sizes. Results show that our models match or exceed Ernest's performance, sometimes enabling us to reduce the prediction error from 126-187% to only 5-19%.

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Big data analytics have become widespread as a means to extract knowledge from large datasets. Such applications are often characterized by highly heterogeneous and irregular data access patterns, challenging existing software and hardware infrastructures to meet their dynamic resource demands. The cloud computing paradigm, in turn, offers a natural hosting solution to such applications as it provides flexibility and elasticity, adapting the allocated resources in response to the application's current needs. However, these properties impose extra challenge to the accurate performance prediction of cloud-based applications, which is a key step to adequate capacity planning and managing of the hosting infrastructure. In this article, we tackle this challenge by exploring three modeling approaches for predicting the performance of big data applications running on the cloud. We evaluate two queuing-based analytical models and a novel fast ad-hoc simulator in various scenarios based on different applications and infrastructure setups. The considered approaches are compared in terms of prediction accuracy and execution time. Our results indicate that our two best approaches can predict average application execution times with only up to a 7% relative error, on average. Moreover, both of them run very fast (requiring at least two orders of magnitude lower execution time than widely used tools while providing slightly better accuracy), being practical for online prediction.

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The last years witnessed a steep rise in data generation worldwide and, consequently, the widespread adoption of software solutions able to support data-intensive applications. Competitiveness and innovation have strongly benefited from these new platforms and methodologies, and there is a great deal of interest around the new possibilities that Big Data analytics promise to make reality. Many companies currently engage in data-intensive processes as part of their core businesses; however, fully embracing the data-driven paradigm is still cumbersome, and establishing a production-ready, fine-tuned deployment is time-consuming, expensive, and resource-intensive. This situation calls for innovative models and techniques to streamline the process of deployment configuration for Big Data applications. In particular, the focus in this paper is on the rightsizing of Cloud deployed clusters, which represent a cost-effective alternative to installation on premises. This paper proposes a novel tool, integrated in a wider DevOps-inspired approach, implementing a parallel and distributed simulation-optimization technique that efficiently and effectively explores the space of alternative Cloud configurations, seeking the minimum cost deployment that satisfies quality of service constraints. The soundness of the proposed solution has been thoroughly validated in a vast experimental campaign encompassing different applications and Big Data platforms.