Efficient and Reuseable Cloud Configuration Search Using Discovery Spaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces Discovery Space, a formal abstraction for efficiently exploring large cloud configuration spaces, enabling reuse and transfer of knowledge to significantly speed up optimal deployment searches.

Contribution

It proposes the Discovery Space abstraction, a generalizable framework for structured, robust, and distributed exploration of large cloud configuration search spaces.

Findings

Enables safe, transparent sharing of optimization data.

Achieves over 90% speed-up in configuration search.

Demonstrates applicability across diverse workloads.

Abstract

Finding the optimal set of cloud resources to deploy a given workload at minimal cost while meeting a defined service level agreement is an active area of research. Combining tens of parameters applicable across a large selection of compute, storage, and services offered by cloud providers with similar numbers of application-specific parameters leads to configuration spaces with millions of deployment options. In this paper, we propose Discovery Space, an abstraction that formalizes the description of workload configuration problems, and exhibits a set of characteristics required for structured, robust and distributed investigations of large search spaces. We describe a concrete implementation of the Discovery Space abstraction and show that it is generalizable across a diverse set of workloads such as Large Language Model inference and Big Data Analytics. We demonstrate that our approach enables safe, transparent sharing of data between executions of best-of-breed optimizers increasing the efficiency of optimal configuration detection in large search spaces. We also demonstrate how Discovery Spaces enable transfer and reuse of knowledge across similar search spaces, enabling configuration search speed-ups of over 90%.