Adaptive auto-scaling for virtual resources in software-defined infrastructure

Abstract

Auto-scaling is a key challenge and benefit in cloud computing infrastructures where applications are deployed on one or more virtual machines (VMs) to balance efficiency in use against delivered performance. In different scenarios, there may be a need for either horizontal or vertical scaling. Therefore, scaling is an important operation of cloud management systems. One way to enable scaling as an automated service is to use a model to predict the VM's future state as a function of time. However, this method is not completely feasible, because the performance of a VM is so dynamic and depends on many parameters. A simpler approach to enable auto-scaling is to use real-time utilization data of VM's and a set of fixed thresholds to execute scaling when thresholds are crossed. However, this method is prone to false positive decisions. Uses this paper, we propose an adaptive method that uses threshold-based mechanisms to control the auto-scaling process and leverages the accuracy and precision given by threshold-based methods to reduce the number of false positives. We present performance results, comparing the fixed threshold methods with our proposed method. We show that our method frequently correctly triggers scaling process in situations where fixed threshold based measurement methods fail.