Abstract

Enterprises are increasingly deploying their applications
in the cloud given the cost-saving advantages,
and the potential to geo-distribute applications to ensure
resilience and better service experience. However,
a key unknown is whether it it is feasible to meet the
stringent response time requirements of enterprise applications
using the cloud. We make several contributions.
First, we show through empirical measurement
studies that (i) there is significant short-term variability
in application workload and response times of individual
components; however (ii) the response times
of the same component in different data-centers are often
uncorrelated. This leads us to argue that there are
potential latency savings if work related to a poorly
performing component is dynamically reassigned to
a replica in a remote data-center. We leverage this
insight to build a system that we term Dealer which
for each component, dynamically splits transactions
among its replicas in different data-centers. In doing
so, Dealer seeks to minimize user response times, and
takes component performance, as well as intra-datacenter
and inter-data-center communication latencies
into account. We have implemented Dealer in a way
that it can be added to any multi-tier application. Evaluations
of our approach on two multi-tier applications
on actual Azure cloud deployments indicates the importance
and feasibility of our mechanisms. For instance,
the 90%ile of application response times could
be reduced by as much as 6 times under natural cloud
dynamics.

Date of this Version

4-18-2011

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