Why Is It Not Solved Yet? Challenges for Production-Ready Autoscaling. Straesser, Martin; Grohmann, Johannes; von Kistowski, Jóakim; Eismann, Simon; Bauer, André; Kounev, Samuel; in Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/SPEC on International Conference on Performance Engineering (2022). 105–115. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.
Autoscaling is a task of major importance in the cloud computing domain as it directly affects both operating costs and customer experience. Although there has been active research in this area for over ten years now, there is still a significant gap between the proposed methods in the literature and the deployed autoscalers in practice. Hence, many research autoscalers do not find their way into production deployments. This paper describes six core challenges that arise in production systems that are still not solved by most research autoscalers. We illustrate these problems through experiments in a realistic cloud environment with a real-world multi-service business application and show that commonly used autoscalers have various shortcomings. In addition, we analyze the behavior of overloaded services and show that these can be problematic for existing autoscalers. Generally, we analyze that these challenges are only insufficiently addressed in the literature and conclude that future scaling approaches should focus on the needs of production systems.
SuanMing: Explainable Prediction of Performance Degradations in Microservice Applications. Grohmann, Johannes; Straesser, Martin; Chalbani, Avi; Eismann, Simon; Arian, Yair; Herbst, Nikolas; Peretz, Noam; Kounev, Samuel; in Proceedings of the 12th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) (2021). ACM, New York, NY, USA.
Acceptance Rate: 29%
Application performance management (APM) tools are useful to observe the performance properties of an application during production. However, APM is normally purely reactive, that is, it can only report about current or past performance degradation. Although some approaches capable of predictive application monitoring have been proposed, they can only report a predicted degradation but cannot explain its root-cause, making it hard to prevent the expected degradation. In this paper, we present SuanMing---a framework for predicting performance degradation of microservice applications running in cloud environments. SuanMing is able to predict future root causes for anticipated performance degradations and therefore aims at preventing performance degradations before they actually occur. We evaluate SuanMing on two realistic microservice applications, TeaStore and TrainTicket, and we show that our approach is able to predict and pinpoint performance degradations with an accuracy of over 90%.