CloudBruno: A Low-Overhead Online Workload Prediction Framework for Cloud Computing

Accurate prediction of future incoming workloads to cloud applications, such as future user request count, is critical to proactive auto-scaling, and in general, critical to the cost-effectiveness of cloud deployments. However, designing a generic predictive framework that can accurately predict for any types of workloads is difficult, especially when the workload is dynamic and can change to a pattern that has not been observed in the training data sets. However, existing workload prediction solutions typically rely on complex machine learning models, which require comprehensive training data, making it difficult for them to handle dynamic workloads. Moreover, the training of existing workload prediction solutions are also expensive in terms of both time and computing resources. This paper presents a generic and low-cost online workload prediction framework, called Cloud Bruno, which combines the more accurate LSTM models with less expensive but fast SVM models to achieve high accuracy and low training overhead. When compared to existing predictors, CloudBruno had at least 8.8 % lower error than existing deep learning-based predictors for a highly-dynamic workload that does not have comprehensive training data (i.e, has changes unknown to training data). For workloads with comprehensive training data, Cloud Bruno's error was at most 2.5 % higher than optimized deep learning-based predictors. More importantly, Cloud Bruno can effectively execute on a free cloud CPU, allowing it to be used as an online workload predictor without additional cost.