Cloud-scale VM-deflation for Running Interactive Applications On Transient Servers

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Transient computing has become popular in public cloud environ-ments for running delay-insensitive batch and data processing ap-plications at low cost. Since transient cloud servers can be revokedat any time by the cloud provider, they are considered unsuitablefor running interactive application such as web services. In thispaper, we present VM deflation as an alternative mechanism toserver preemption for reclaiming resources from transient cloudservers under resource pressure. Using real traces from top-tiercloud providers, we show the feasibility of using VM deflation asa resource reclamation mechanism for interactive applications inpublic clouds. We show how current hypervisor mechanisms can beused to implement VM deflation and present cluster deflation poli-cies for resource management of transient and on-demand cloudVMs. Experimental evaluation of our deflation system on a Linuxcluster shows that microservice-based applications can be deflatedby up to 50% with negligible performance overhead. Our cluster-level deflation policies allow overcommitment levels as high as 50%,with less than a 1% decrease in application throughput, and canenable cloud platforms to increase revenue by 30%.