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State-Space Feedback Control for Elastic Distributed Storage in a Cloud Environment

Authors:
M. Amir Moulavi
Ahmad Al-Shishtawy
Vladimir Vlassov

Keywords: elasticity; key-value store; Cloud; state-space feedback control

Abstract:
Elasticity in Cloud computing is an ability of a system to scale up and down (request and release resources) in response to changes in its environment and workload. Elasticity can be achieved manually or automatically. Efforts are being made to automate elasticity in order to improve system performance under dynamic workloads. In this paper, we report our experience in designing an elasticity controller for a key-value storage service deployed in a Cloud environment. To design our controller, we have adopted a control theoretic approach. Automation of elasticity is achieved by providing a feedback controller that automatically increases and decreases the number of nodes in order to meet service level objectives under high load and to reduce costs under low load. Every step in the building of a controller for elastic storage, including system identification and controller design, is discussed. We have evaluated our approach by using simulation. We have developed a simulation framework EStoreSim in order to simulate an elastic key-value store in a Cloud environment and be able to experiment with different controllers. We have examined the implemented controller against specific service level objectives and evaluated the controller behavior in different scenarios. Our simulation experiments have shown the feasibility of our approach to automate elasticity of storage services using state-space feedback control.

Pages: 18 to 27

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: March 25, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3913

ISBN: 978-1-61208-187-8

Location: St. Maarten, The Netherlands Antilles

Dates: from March 25, 2012 to March 30, 2012