Autoscaler Evaluation and Configuration: A Practitioner's Guideline

Abstract

Autoscalers are indispensable parts of modern cloud deployments and determine the service quality and cost of a cloud application in dynamic workloads. The configuration of an autoscaler strongly influences its performance and is also one of the biggest challenges and showstoppers for the practical applicability of many research autoscalers. Many proposed cloud experiment methodologies can only be partially applied in practice, and many autoscaling papers use custom evaluation methods and metrics. This paper presents a practical guideline for obtaining meaningful and interpretable results on autoscaler performance with reasonable overhead. We provide step-by-step instructions for defining realistic usage behaviors and traffic patterns. We divide the analysis of autoscaler performance into a qualitative antipattern-based analysis and a quantitative analysis. To demonstrate the applicability of our guideline, we conduct several experiments with a microservice of our industry partner in a realistic test environment.