Feedback-control-based performance regulation for multi-tenant applications

Abstract

The ability to deliver different performance levels based on tenant-specific service level agreements (SLAs) is a key requirement for multi-tenant internet applications. However, workload variations and extensive resource sharing among tenants make this goal hard to achieve. We address the issue with a performance regulator based on feedback-control. The regulator has a hierarchical structure, with which a high-level controller manages request admission rates to prevent overloading and a low-level controller manages resource allocation for admitted requests to track a specified level of service differentiation between the cohosted tenants. A prototype implementation of the performance regulator based on Tomcat and MySQL is provided and a multitenant version of RUBBoS benchmark is used for evaluation. Experimental results indicate that the regulator effectively bounds the response time for each tenant while maintaining high resource utilization levels. © 2009 IEEE.