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Workload characterization and synthesis for cloud using generative stochastic processes

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Abstract

In the recent past, we are witnessing a proliferation in the number of web/mobile applications being hosted on a service provider’s Cloud. This has led to a surge in the traffic to the data centers hosting Virtual Machines (VM) running the cloud instances. In a cloud environment, a workload is defined as the requests coming in for the applications which are hosted on VM instances. Workload characterization helps in modeling the associations and correlations in the workload. Workload characterization models that are representative of the ground truth, can be leveraged for: (i) an accurate capacity planning, (ii) better resource utilization, (iii) reducing the spin-up times of VM instances, and (iv) maintaining compliance with Service Level Agreement (SLA). We propose a first-of-its-kind generative Dirichlet process-based model using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for workload characterization. The characterization model is dependency preserving, regularized, and generative in nature, that relates the workload to the underlying application or user’s behavior that might have generated the workload. To evaluate the descriptive and predictive accuracies of the proposed model, we designed experiments using the Bit Brains Trace (BBT) and Alibaba Cluster Trace. The descriptive accuracy of the proposed workload characterization model is assessed by comparing a synthetic workload against the real workload using Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) and Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) as the metrics. We have also performed statistical tests to assess the similarity between real workload and synthetic workload.

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Data availability statement

Real workload traces available at Bit Brains [1] and Alibaba cluster traces [24] have been used. The synthetic workloads generated from the proposed model are available in the GitHub repository that is accessible through https://github.com/sindhu1018.

Notes

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  2. https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/models/ldamodel.html.

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  4. https://matplotlib.org.

  5. https://github.com/sindhu1018/alibaba_workload_trace.

  6. https://github.com/sindhu1018.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Mr. Gaurav and Mr. Sukhdev Singh who are undergraduate students in National Institute of Technology Andhra Pradesh, for their help with dataset collection and experimental setup.

Funding

This work has been sponsored by LinkedIn under a research grant for the project entitled “A Scalable Resource Requirement Prediction and Provisioning Framework for Elastic Cloud”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Andhra Pradesh, Tadepalligudem, Andhra Pradesh, India

    Korrapati Sindhu & Karthick Seshadri

  2. Data and AI Platforms, LinkedIn, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

    Chidambaran Kollengode

Authors
  1. Korrapati Sindhu
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  2. Karthick Seshadri
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  3. Chidambaran Kollengode
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Correspondence to Karthick Seshadri.

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Sindhu, K., Seshadri, K. & Kollengode, C. Workload characterization and synthesis for cloud using generative stochastic processes. J Supercomput 78, 18825–18855 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-022-04597-y

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