Performance-Based Service Differentiation in Clouds

Due to fierce competition, cloud providers need to run their data-centers efficiently. One of the issues is to increase data-center utilization while maintaining applications' performance targets. Achieving high data-center utilization while meeting applications' performance is difficult, as data-center overload may lead to poor performance of hosted services. Service differentiation has been proposed to control which services get degraded. However, current approaches are capacity-based, which are oblivious to the observed performance of each service and cannot divide the available capacity among hosted services so as to minimize overall performance degradation. In this paper we propose performance-based service differentiation. In case enough capacity is available, each service is automatically allocated the right amount of capacity that meets its target performance, expressed either as response time or throughput. In case of overload, we propose two service differentiation schemes that dynamically decide which services to degrade and to what extent. We carried out an extensive set of experiments using different services -- interactive as well as non-interactive -- by varying the workload mixes of each service over time. The results demonstrate that our solution precisely provides guaranteed performance or service differentiation depending on available capacity.