• DOI:10.1145/1342171.1342172
• Corpus ID: 10041862

Agile dynamic provisioning of multi-tier Internet applications

@article{Urgaonkar2008AgileDP,
  title={Agile dynamic provisioning of multi-tier Internet applications},
  author={Bhuvan Urgaonkar and Prashant J. Shenoy and Abhishek Chandra and Pawan Goyal and Timothy Wood},
  journal={ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst.},
  year={2008},
  volume={3},
  pages={1:1-1:39}
}

• B. Urgaonkar, P. Shenoy, +2 authors Timothy Wood
• Published 27 March 2008
• Computer Science
• ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst.

Dynamic capacity provisioning is a useful technique for handling the multi-time-scale variations seen in Internet workloads. In this article, we propose a novel dynamic provisioning technique for multi-tier Internet applications that employs (1) a flexible queuing model to determine how much of the resources to allocate to each tier of the application, and (2) 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 Xen/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 of switching servers across applications from several minutes to less than a second, while meeting the performance targets of residual sessions.