Smartpick: Workload Prediction for Serverless-enabled Scalable Data Analytics Systems

TL;DR

Smartpick is a system that intelligently combines serverless and virtual machine resources for scalable data analytics, using machine learning to optimize configurations for cost and performance in cloud environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ML-based approach to dynamically optimize serverless and VM configurations, enabling better cost-performance tradeoffs in data analytics systems.

Findings

Achieved up to 50% cost reduction compared to baselines.

Predicted configurations with over 97% accuracy on AWS and Google Cloud.

Effectively handles workload dynamics through event-driven retraining.

Abstract

Many data analytic systems have adopted a newly emerging compute resource, serverless (SL), to handle data analytics queries in a timely and cost-efficient manner, i.e., serverless data analytics. While these systems can start processing queries quickly thanks to the agility and scalability of SL, they may encounter performance- and cost-bottlenecks based on workloads due to SL's worse performance and more expensive cost than traditional compute resources, e.g., virtual machine (VM). In this project, we introduce Smartpick, a SL-enabled scalable data analytics system that exploits SL and VM together to realize composite benefits, i.e., agility from SL and better performance with reduced cost from VM. Smartpick uses a machine learning prediction scheme, decision-tree based Random Forest with Bayesian Optimizer, to determine SL and VM configurations, i.e., how many SL and VM instances for queries, that meet cost-performance goals. Smartpick offers a knob for applications to allow them to explore a richer cost-performance tradeoff space opened by exploiting SL and VM together. To maximize the benefits of SL, Smartpick supports a simple but strong mechanism, called relay-instances. Smartpick also supports event-driven prediction model retraining to deal with workload dynamics. A Smartpick prototype was implemented on Spark and deployed on live test-beds, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Evaluation results indicate 97.05% and 83.49% prediction accuracies respectively with up to 50% cost reduction as opposed to the baselines. The results also confirm that Smartpick allows data analytics applications to navigate the richer cost-performance tradeoff space efficiently and to handle workload dynamics effectively and automatically.