AUTO-SCALING AND ADJUSTMENT PLATFORM FOR CLOUD-BASED SYSTEMS

Abstract

For customers of cloud-computing platforms it is important to minimize the infrastructure footprint and associated costs while providing required levels of Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) dictated by the Service Level Agreement (SLA). To assist with that cloud service providers are offering: (1) horizontal resource scaling through provisioning and destruction of virtual machines and containers, (2) vertical scaling through changing the capacity of individual cloud nodes. Existing scaling solutions mostly concentrate on low-level metrics like CPU load and memory consumption which doesn’t always correlate with the level of SLA conformity. Such technical measures should be preprocessed and viewed from a higher level of abstraction. Application level metrics should also be considered when deciding upon scaling the cloud-based solution. Existing scaling platforms are mostly proprietary technologies owned by cloud service providers themselves or by third parties and offered as Software as a Service. Enterprise applications could span infrastructures of multiple public and private clouds, dictating that the auto-scaling solution should not be isolated inside a single cloud infrastructure. The goal of this paper is to address the challenges above by presenting the architecture of Auto-scaling and Adjustment Platform for Cloud-based Systems (ASAPCS). It is based on open-source technologies and supports integration of various low and high level performance metrics, providing higher levels of abstraction for design of scaling algorithms. ASAPCS can be used with any cloud service provider and guarantees that move from one cloud platform to another will not result in complete redesign of the scaling algorithm. ASAPCS itself is horizontally scalable and can process large amounts of real-time data which is particularly important for applications developed following the microservices architectural style. ASAPCS approaches the scaling problem in a nonstandard way by considering real-time adjustments of the application logic to be part of the scalability strategy if it can result in performance improvements.