User-centric cloud application management

It has been reported by researchers that cloud applications show performance variability in the post-deployment phase, which may result in QoE degradation. To maintain QoE cloud users may need to migrate their applications to a new VM type with higher configuration from the same CP or with a similar configuration from a different CP. Apart from performance, cost can also be an important factor for certain budget-constrained users who may be interested to migrate to different instances if the price for the current cloud service rises or other providers offer a better price.

To help cloud users in detecting QoE degradation and selecting a target VM type for application migration, this thesis proposes a user-centric cloud application management framework, named MyMinder (Multi-objective dYnamic MIgratioN Decision makER). Specifically, MyMinder employs a ‘monitoring system’ to monitor application domain specific performance metrics, a novel ‘detection algorithm’ to detect QoE degradation and a ‘VM selection method’ to choose a target VM type for application migration in the post-deployment phase.

Evaluation of the performance of the detection algorithm was carried out by deploying a Darwin media streaming service (representative of real-world media streaming applications), and by designing a benchmark for generating realistic media streaming client requests. Evaluation of the VM selection method was carried out by using an example scenario where a cloud application suffers from a QoE degradation and requires migration.

The scenario was investigated in a lab-based cloud testbed where data analytic and HPC applications were executed. To represent real-world cloud service offerings from multiple public CPs, the testbed contains a number of server machines offering a range of VM configuration choices. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed detection algorithm can reliably detect the QoE degradation of a cloud application and the VM selection method can choose an optimal VM to migrate the application from the under-performing VM in order to maintain the QoE.