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Dynamic resource management in Internet hosting platforms
Abstract
Internet applications such as on-line news, retail, and financial sites have become commonplace in recent years. Due to the prevalence of these applications, platforms that host them have become an important and attractive business. These platforms, called hosting platforms, typically employ large clusters of servers to host multiple applications. Hosting platforms provide performance guarantees to the hosted applications, such as guarantees on response time or throughput, in return for revenue. Two key features of Internet applications make the design of hosting platforms challenging. First, modern Internet applications are extremely complex. Existing resource management solutions rely on simple abstractions of these applications and are therefore fail to accurately capture this complexity. Second, these applications exhibit highly dynamic workloads with multi-time-scale variations. Managing the resources in a hosting platform to realize the often opposing goals of meeting application performance targets and achieving high resource utilization is therefore a difficult endeavor. In this thesis, we present resource management mechanisms that an Internet hosting platform can employ to address these challenges. Our solution consists of resource management mechanisms operating at multiple time-scales. We develop a predictive dynamic capacity provisioning technique for Internet applications that operates at the time-scale of hours or days. A key ingredient of this technique is a model of an Internet application that is used for deriving the resource requirements of the application. We employ both queuing theory and empirical measurements to devise models of Internet applications. The second mechanism is a reactive provisioning technique that operates at the time-scale of a few minutes and utilizes virtual machine monitors for agile switching of servers in the hosting platform among applications. Finally, we develop a policing technique that operates at a per-request level. This technique allows a hosted application to remain operational even under extreme overloads where the arrival rates are an order of magnitude higher than the provisioned capacity. Our experiments on a prototype hosting platform consisting of forty Linux machines demonstrate the utility and feasibility of our techniques.
Subject Area
Computer science
Recommended Citation
Urgaonkar, Bhuvan, "Dynamic resource management in Internet hosting platforms" (2005). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI3193951.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193951