Section: New Results

System support: Self-adaptive Internet services

Participant : Sara Bouchenak.

Although distributed services provide a means for supporting scalable Internet applications, their ad-hoc provisioning and configuration pose a difficult tradeoff between service performance and availability. This is made harder as Internet service workloads tend to be heterogeneous, and vary over time in amount of concurrent clients and in mixture of client interactions. This work proposes an approach for building self-adaptive Internet services through utility-aware capacity planning and provisioning. First, an analytic model is presented to predict Internet service performance, availability and cost. Second, a utility function is defined and a utility-aware capacity planning method is proposed to calculate the optimal service configuration which guarantees SLA performance and availability objectives while minimizing functioning costs. Third, an adaptive control method is proposed to automatically apply the optimal configuration to the Internet service. Finally, the proposed model, capacity planning and control methods are implemented and applied to an online bookstore. Experimental evaluations show that the service successfully self-adapts to both workload mix and workload amount variations, and present significant benefits in terms of performance and availability, with a saving of resources underlying the Internet service.

This work is part of the MyCloud ANR project. It has been described in a chapter of the book titled Performance and Dependability in Service Computing, 2011. There has been an industrial transfer of the MoKa  software prototype.