On Analyzing Elasticity Relationships of Cloud Services

With the increasing cloud popularity, substantial effort has been paid for the development of emerging elastic cloud services, consisting of different units distributed among virtual machines/containers in different clouds. Due to the software stack and deployment complexity in single and multi-cloud scenarios, developing and managing such services is impeded by a lack of tools and techniques for understanding the elasticity relationships among individual service units, which influence the service's overall elasticity. In this paper we characterize the elasticity relationships, and develop mechanisms for analyzing them, based on service monitoring information and elasticity requirements. From collected monitoring information we abstract the elasticity behavior of the whole cloud service and individual units, over which we design a customizable algorithm for relationships analysis. We illustrate our approach via several experiments with an elastic data service for M2M platforms, highlighting the importance of determining elasticity relationships for the development and operation of elastic services.