TY - GEN
T1 - Availability knob
T2 - 7th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, SoCC 2016
AU - Shahrad, Mohammad
AU - Wentzlaff, David
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Kyle Jamieson, Alexey Lavrov, and Prateek Mittal for feedback on this work. This work was partially supported by the NSF under Grants No. CCF-1217553, CCF-1453112, and CCF-1438980, AFOSR under Grant No. FA9550-14-1-0148, and DARPA under Grant No. N66001-14-1-4040. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of our sponsors.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2016/10/5
Y1 - 2016/10/5
N2 - Failure is inevitable in cloud environments. Finding the root cause of a failure can be very complex or at times nearly impossible. Different cloud customers have varying availability demands as well as a diverse willingness to pay for availability. In contrast to existing solutions that try to provide higher and higher availability in the cloud, we propose the Availability Knob (AK). AK provides flexible, user-defined, availability in IaaS clouds, allowing the IaaS cloud customer to express their desire for availability to the cloud provider. Complementary to existing high-reliability solutions and not requiring hardware changes, AK enables more efficient markets. This leads to reduced provider costs, increased provider profit, and improved user satisfaction when compared to an IaaS cloud with no ability to convey availability needs. We leverage game theory to derive incentive compatible pricing, which not only enables AK to function with no knowledge of the root cause of failure but also function under adversarial situations where users deliberately cause downtime. We develop a high-level stochastic simulator to test AK in large-scale IaaS clouds over long time periods. We also prototype AK in OpenStack to explore availability-API tradeoffs and to provide a grounded, real-world, implementation. Our results show that deploying AK leads to more than 10% cost reduction for providers and improves user satisfaction. It also enables providers to set variable profit margins based on the risk of not meeting availability guarantees and the disparity in availability supply/demand. Variable profit margins enable cloud providers to improve their profit by as much as 20%.
AB - Failure is inevitable in cloud environments. Finding the root cause of a failure can be very complex or at times nearly impossible. Different cloud customers have varying availability demands as well as a diverse willingness to pay for availability. In contrast to existing solutions that try to provide higher and higher availability in the cloud, we propose the Availability Knob (AK). AK provides flexible, user-defined, availability in IaaS clouds, allowing the IaaS cloud customer to express their desire for availability to the cloud provider. Complementary to existing high-reliability solutions and not requiring hardware changes, AK enables more efficient markets. This leads to reduced provider costs, increased provider profit, and improved user satisfaction when compared to an IaaS cloud with no ability to convey availability needs. We leverage game theory to derive incentive compatible pricing, which not only enables AK to function with no knowledge of the root cause of failure but also function under adversarial situations where users deliberately cause downtime. We develop a high-level stochastic simulator to test AK in large-scale IaaS clouds over long time periods. We also prototype AK in OpenStack to explore availability-API tradeoffs and to provide a grounded, real-world, implementation. Our results show that deploying AK leads to more than 10% cost reduction for providers and improves user satisfaction. It also enables providers to set variable profit margins based on the risk of not meeting availability guarantees and the disparity in availability supply/demand. Variable profit margins enable cloud providers to improve their profit by as much as 20%.
KW - Cloud availability
KW - Cloud economics
KW - Failureaware scheduling
KW - Flexible availability
KW - SLA
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84995609178&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84995609178&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2987550.2987556
DO - 10.1145/2987550.2987556
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84995609178
T3 - Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, SoCC 2016
SP - 42
EP - 56
BT - Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, SoCC 2016
A2 - Diao, Yanlei
A2 - Aguilera, Marcos K.
A2 - Cooper, Brian
A2 - Diao, Yanlei
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 5 October 2016 through 7 October 2016
ER -