OnlineElastMan: Self-Trained Proactive Elasticity Manager for Cloud-Based Storage Services

Abstract

The pay-as-you-go pricing model and the illusion of unlimited resources in the Cloud initiate the idea to provision services elastically. Elastic provisioning of services allocates/de-allocates resources dynamically in response to the changes of the workload. It minimizes the service provisioning cost while maintaining the desired service level objectives (SLOs). Model-predictive control is often used in building such elasticity controllers that dynamically provision resources. However, they need to be trained, either online or offline, before making accurate scaling decisions.The training process involves tedious and significant amount of work as well as some expertise, especially when the model has many dimensions and the training granularity is fine, which is proved to be essential in order to build an accurate elasticity controller. In this paper, we present OnlineElast-Man, which is a self-trained proactive elasticity manager for cloud-based storage services. It automatically evolves itself while serving the workload. Experiments using Onli-neElastMan with Cassandra indicate that OnlineElastMan continuously improves its provision accuracy, i.e., minimizing provisioning cost and SLO violations, under various workload patterns.

Description and Evaluation of Elasticity Strategies for Business Processes in the Cloud

“…A self-trained elasticity controller, called OnlineElastMan, has been proposed in [Liu 2016] for managing cloud-based storage systems elasticity. It has been defined to automatically train and evolve itself while serving workload.…”