Efficient Server Provisioning with Control for End-to-End Response Time Guarantee on Multitier Clusters

Dynamic virtual server provisioning is critical to quality-of-service assurance for multitier Internet applications. In this paper, we address three important challenging problems. First, we propose an efficient server provisioning approach on multitier clusters based on an end-to-end resource allocation optimization model. It is to minimize the number of virtual servers allocated to the system while the average end-to-end response time guarantee is satisfied. Second, we design a model-independent fuzzy controller for bounding an important performance metric, the 90th-percentile response time of requests flowing through the multitier architecture. Third, to compensate for the latency due to the dynamic addition of virtual servers, we design a self-tuning component that adaptively adjusts the output scaling factor of the fuzzy controller according to the transient behavior of the end-to-end response time. Extensive simulation results, using two representative customer behavior models in a typical three-tier web cluster, demonstrate that the provisioning approach is able to significantly reduce the number of virtual servers allocated for the performance guarantee compared to an existing representative approach. The approach integrated with the model-independent self-tuning fuzzy controller can efficiently assure the average and the 90th-percentile end-to-end response time guarantees on multitier clusters.