Lightweight Automatic Resource Scaling for Multi-tier Web Applications

Abstract

Dynamic resource scaling is a key property of cloud computing. Users can acquire or release required capacity for their applications on-the-fly. The most widely used and practical approach for dynamic scaling based on predefined policies (rules). For example, IaaS providers such as RightScale asks application owners to manually set the scaling rules. This task assumes, that the user has an expertise knowledge about the application being run on the cloud. However, it is not always true. In this paper we propose a lightweight adaptive multi-tier scaling framework VscalerLight, which learns scaling policy online. Our framework performs fine-grained vertical resource scaling of multi-tier web application. We present the design and implementation of VscalerLight. We evaluate the framework against widely used RUBiS benchmark. Results show that the application under control of VscalerLight guarantees 95th percentile response time specified in SLA.