Kaleidoscope: Cloud Micro-Elasticity via VM State Coloring

Roy Bryant, Alexey Tumanov, Olga Irzak, Adin Scannell, Kaustubh Joshi, Matti Hiltunen, H. Andres Lagar-Cavilla, Eyal de Lara

European Conference on Computer Systems (Eurosys), Saltzburg, Austria, April 2011

 

Abstract

We introduce cloud micro-elasticity, a new model for cloud Virtual Machine (VM) allocation and management. Current cloud users over-provision long-lived VMs with large memory footprints to better absorb load spikes, and to conserve performance-sensitive caches. Instead, we achieve elasticity by swiftly cloning VMs into many transient, short-lived, fractional workers to multiplex physical resources at a much finer granularity. The memory of a micro-elastic clone is a logical replica of the parent VM state, including caches, yet its footprint is proportional to the workload, and often a fraction of the nominal maximum. We enable micro-elasticity through a novel technique dubbed VM state coloring, which classifies VM memory into sets of semantically-related regions, and optimizes the propagation, allocation and deduplication of these regions. Using coloring, we build Kaleidoscope and empirically demonstrate its ability to create micro-elastic cloned servers.We model the impact of microelasticity on a demand dataset fromAT&T’s cloud, and show that fine-grained multiplexing yields infrastructure reductions of 30% relative to state-of-the art techniques for managing elastic clouds.

 

Manuscript

Pdf

 

Bibtex

Bib