CloudMix: Generating Diverse and Reducible Workloads for Cloud Systems

Rui Han, Zan Zong, Fan Zhang, José Luis Vázquez-Poletti, Zhen Jia, Lei Wang

Abstract: The prosperity of cloud computing offers common infrastructures to a wide range of applications. Understanding these applications' workload behaviors is the premise of designing, managing, and optimizing cloud systems. Considering the heterogeneity and diversity of cloud workloads, for the sake of fairness, cloud benchmarks must be able to accurately replicate their behaviors in cloud systems, including both the usages of cloud resources and the micro-architectural behaviors beyond the virtualization layer. Furthermore, workloads spanning long durations are usually required to achieve representativeness in evaluation. Hence the more challenging issue is to significantly reduce the evaluation duration while still preserving their workload characteristics. This paper presents our efforts towards generating cloud workloads of diverse behaviors and reducible durations. Our benchmark tool, CloudMix, employs a repository of reducible workload blocks (RWBs) as the high level abstraction of workload behaviors, including usages of the two most important cloud resources (CPU and memory) and their pairing micro-architectural operations. CloudMix further introduces an efficient methodology to combine RWBs to synthesize and replicate diverse cloud workloads in real-world traces. The effectiveness of CloudMix is demonstrated by generating a variety of reducible workloads according to a Google cluster trace and by applying these workloads in job scheduling optimization on Hadoop YARN. The evaluation results show: (i) when the workload durations are reduced by 100 times, the replication errors of workload behaviors are smaller than 2.08%; (ii) when providing fast evaluations (workload durations are reduced by 10 to 100 times) to recommend the optimal setting in YARN job scheduling, the performance degradation in the recommended setting is just 0.69% compared to that of the actual optimal setting. CloudMix is publicly available from the project home page http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench/multi tenancy/.