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

TL;DR

This paper proposes VM deflation as a resource reclamation method for transient cloud servers, enabling interactive applications to run efficiently with minimal performance impact and increased cloud revenue.

Contribution

It introduces VM deflation as an alternative to preemption, demonstrating its feasibility and effectiveness for supporting interactive applications in transient cloud environments.

Findings

VM deflation can reduce VM size by up to 50% with negligible overhead.

Cluster deflation policies support overcommitment levels up to 50%.

Implementing deflation can increase cloud revenue by 30%.

Abstract

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\%.