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Cost-aware cloud bursting for enterprise applications
Guo T., Sharma U., Shenoy P., Wood T., Sahu S. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology13 (3):1-24,2014.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Oct 6 2014

Seagull, a system to optimally manage cloud bursting, is described in this paper; optimization is with respect to the number and size of virtual machine (VM) images and total data transfer. A performance evaluation of Seagull is also provided. The authors address an important research topic in cloud computing, exploring how to manage applications with varying resource requirements in an automated manner that also minimizes costs in terms of both dollars and application performance. Seagull is designed for use by enterprise data centers that require bursting into cloud resources for occasional excess capacity demands. The paper offers a valuable contribution to a difficult and reality-based problem.

The authors use some insight in designing their approach:

(1) When an application that is large (lots of data, many VMs) requires more resources than are available locally, it may be better to move some other, smaller apps into the cloud, freeing up local resources.
(2) Since the biggest delay in restarting an app that has been moved comes from having to move the data (app data and virtual machine images), occasional precopying of the smaller apps with a high likelihood of being moved into the cloud will significantly reduce the delay caused by the need to copy.

Seagull addresses the classic bin-packing problem, which is known to be NP-hard. An optimal integer linear program (ILP) formulation is introduced and an algorithm for precopying is presented; in addition, an algorithm using a greedy heuristic is provided for approximating an optimal answer for large-scale problems. The heuristic uses sorting to improve results. The authors also present a prototyped Seagull using a Xen-based local data center and Amazon EC2 for cloud bursting. Finally, a detailed experimental evaluation for Seagull is presented, using three examples of different web applications. The applications each have a MySQL database backend; one is a two-tier Java application implemented as an Apache Tomcat servlet, one uses a PHP application, and one uses an Ajax application and supports a memcached tier that can be horizontally scaled.

The authors’ testbed/prototype choices (for example, choice of apps, parameters/sizes selected) are well reasoned and explained. The design is flexible in that different algorithms/weighting representing cost and excess demand can be substituted. The experimental protocol is thorough and well reasoned.

Figure 12 shows Seagull’s scalability to 800 hosts with proportional increases in numbers of the three applications. Real data centers may be running hundreds (or thousands) of applications, as well as thousands of hosts. It would be interesting to think through how Seagull’s performance would be impacted by this much longer list of applications to consider as part of the computation time.

Overall, this was an excellent and very thorough paper.

Reviewer:  Jill Gemmill Review #: CR142795 (1501-0056)
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