Towards autonomic hosting of multi-tier internet applications

A vast amount of caching and replication solutions have been proposed in the literature to improve the performance of multi-tiered Web applications (which we call as Internet services). These solutions aim to alleviate the scalability bottleneck of only a single tier and different techniques are suitable for services of different nature. However, from the view point of an administrator who wants to host a service scalably, it is not easy to determine the right set of techniques to apply. This leads to either gross over-provisioning of resources or poor performance. We believe that the decision process of choosing the right techniques for a service can be automated. To strengthen our position, we propose the design of an autonomic hosting system that uses a combination of multi queue models and online simulations to achieve our goals. Even though our work is very much in progress, we believe the techniques used in our system can provide a good start in taming the complex problem of scalable hosting of services.