Data centers and clouds are increasingly offering low-cost computational resources in the form of transient virtual machines. Whenever demand for computational resources exceeds their availability, transient resources can reclaimed by preempting the transient VMs. Conventionally, these transient VMs are used by low-priority applications that can tolerate the disruption caused by preemptions.
In this paper we propose an alternative approach for reclaiming resources, called resource deflation. Resource deflation allows applications to dynamically shrink (and expand) in response to resource pressure, instead of being preempted outright. Deflatable VMs allow applications to continue running even under resource pressure, and increase the utility of low-priority transient resources. Deflation uses a dynamic, multi-level cascading reclamation technique that allows applications, operating systems, and hypervisors to implement their own policies for handling resource pressure. For distributed data processing, machine learning, and deep neural network training, our multi-level approach reduces the performance degradation by up to 2x compared to existing preemption-based approaches. When deflatable VMs are deployed on a cluster, our policies allow up to 1.6x utilization without the risk of preemption.
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Cloud-scale VM-deflation for Running Interactive Applications On Transient Servers
Transient computing has become popular in public cloud environments for running delay-insensitive batch and data processing applications at low cost. Since transient cloud servers can be revoked at any time by the cloud provider, they are considered unsuitable for running interactive application such as web services. In this paper, we present VM deflation as an alternative mechanism to server preemption for reclaiming resources from transient cloud servers under resource pressure. Using real traces from top-tier cloud providers, we show the feasibility of using VM deflation as a resource reclamation mechanism for interactive applications in public clouds. We show how current hypervisor mechanisms can be used to implement VM deflation and present cluster deflation policies for resource management of transient and on-demand cloud VMs. Experimental evaluation of our deflation system on a Linux cluster shows that microservice-based applications can be deflated by 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 can enable cloud platforms to increase revenue by 30%
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10190511
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 53 to 64
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3369583.3392675
