Workload-aware resource management for software-defined compute

Abstract

With advance of cloud computing technologies, there have been more diverse and heterogeneous workloads running on cloud datacenters. As more and more workloads run on the datacenters, the contention for the limited shared resources may increase, which can make the management of the resources difficult, often leading to low resource utilization. For effective resource management, the management software for the datacenters should be redesigned and used in a software-defined way to dynamically allocate "right" resources to workloads based on different characteristics of workloads so that they can decrease the cost of their operation while meeting the service level objectives such as satisfying the latency requirement. However, recent datacenter resource management frameworks do not operate in such software-defined ways, thus leading to not only the waste of resources, but also the performance degradation. To address this problem, we have designed and developed a workload-aware resource management framework for software-defined compute. The framework consists mainly of the workload profiler and workload-aware schedulers. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework, we have prototyped the schedulers that minimize the interferences on the shared computing and memory resources. We have compared them with the existing schedulers in the OpenStack and VMWare vSphere testbeds, and evaluated its effectiveness in high contention scenarios. Our experimental study suggests that the use of our proposed approach can lead to up to 100 % improvements in throughput and up to 95 % reductions in tail latency for latency critical workloads compared to the existing ones.