Heterogeneity and Interference-Aware Virtual Machine Provisioning for Predictable Performance in the Cloud

Abstract—Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud providers offer tenants elastic computing resources in the form of virtual machine (VM) instances to run their jobs. Recently, providing predictable performance (i.e., performance guarantee) for tenant applications is becoming increasingly compelling in IaaS clouds. However, the hardware heterogeneity and performance interference across the same type of cloud VM instances can bring substantial performance variation to tenant applications, which inevitably stops the tenants from moving their performance-sensitive applications to the IaaS cloud. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes Heifer, a Heterogeneity and interference-aware VM provisioning framework for tenant applications, by focusing on MapReduce as a representative cloud application. It predicts the performance of MapReduce applications by designing a lightweight performance model using the online-measured resource utilization and capturing VM interference. Based on such a performance model, Heifer provisions the VM instances of the good-performing hardware type (i.e., the hardware that achieves the best application performance) to achieve predictable performance for tenant applications, by explicitly exploring the hardware heterogeneity and capturing VM interference. With extensive prototype experiments in our local private cloud and a real-world public cloud (i.e., Microsoft Azure) as well as complementary large-scale simulations, we demonstrate that Heifer can guarantee the job performance while saving the job budget for tenants. Moreover, our evaluation results show that Heifer can improve the job throughput of cloud datacenters, such that the revenue of cloud providers can be increased, thereby achieving a win-win situation between providers and tenants. Index Terms—Cloud computing, hardware heterogeneity, performance interference, predictable performance, VM provisioning. F