CLAP-Bot: a framework for automatic optimization of high-performance elastic applications on the Clouds

The computational cloud has become notorious due to its business model, where the user only pays to use the system, with no acquisition or maintenance costs. However, cloud providers such as AWS EC2 and Google Computing Engine offer several virtual machine types making it difficult to choose which of them is most suitable to the user’s application and objective.In this work, we present CLAP-Bot, a system that automatically monitors and adjusts the computing infrastructure based on some recipe. CLAP-Bot is built over CLAP, allowing creating and managing computational clusters in different cloud providers. The recipe is a component that can read application metrics and execute a set of actions on the infrastructure. The application monitor is decoupled from the recipe, allowing it to be used transparently with different applications. We show how CLAP-Bot works by implementing three dynamic provisioning policies as recipes and evaluating them. Besides that, together with CLAP-Bot we also present CLAP-Bot-Sim, a discrete event simulator that allows modeling the use of a given recipe without the need to instantiate any virtual machine. CLAP-Bot-Sim also allows modeling dynamic events, such as virtual machine interruptions and instance price oscillation over time. We show that CLAP-Bot-Sim can accurately simulate the effects of recipes on the computing infrastructure and can easily be interchanged with CLAP-Bot.