Reward Scheduling for QoS in Cloud Applications

The growing popularity of multi-tenant, cloud-based computing platforms is increasing interest in resource allocation models that permit flexible sharing of the underlying infrastructure. This thesis introduces a novel IO resource allocation model that better captures the requirements of paying tenants sharing a physical infrastructure. The model addresses a major concern regarding application performance stability when clients migrate from a dedicated to a shared platform. Specifically, while clients would like their applications to behave similarly in both situations, traditional models of fairness, like proportional share allocation, do not exhibit this behavior in the context of modern multi-tiered storage architectures. We also present a scheduling algorithm, the Reward Scheduler, that implements the new allocation policy, by rewarding clients with better runtime characteristics, resulting in benefits to both the clients and the service provider. Moreover, the Reward scheduler also supports weight-based capacity allocation subject to a minimum reservation and maximum limitation on the IO allocation for each task. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm proportionally allocates the system capacity in proportion to their entitlements