Measuring software systems scalability for proactive data center management

Abstract

The current trend of increasingly larger Web-based applications makes scalability the key challenge when developing, deploying, and maintaining data centers. At the same time, the migration to the cloud computing paradigm means that each data center hosts an increasingly complex mix of applications, from multiple owners and in constant evolution. Unfortunately, managing such data centers in a cost-effective manner requires that the scalability properties of the hosted workloads to be accurately known, namely, to proactively provision adequate resources and to plan the most economical placement of applications. Obviously, stopping each of them and running a custom benchmark to asses its scalability properties is not an option. In this paper we address this challenge with a tool to measure the software scalability regarding CPU availability, to predict system behavior in face of varying resources and an increasing workload. This tool does not depend on a particular application and relies only on Linux's SystemTap probing infrastructure. We validate the approach first using simulation and then in an actual system. The resulting better prediction of scalability properties should allow improved (self-)management practices. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.