Scalability and Performance Management of Internet Applications in the Cloud

Abstract

Elasticity and on-demand are significant characteristics that attract many customers to host their Internet applications in the cloud. They allow quick reacting to changing application needs by adding or releasing resources responding to the actual rather than to the projected demand. Nevertheless, neglecting the overhead of acquiring resources, which mainly is attributed to networking overhead, can result in periods of under-provisioning, leading to degrading the application performance. In this chapter, the authors study the possibility of mitigating the impact of resource provisioning overhead. They direct the study to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provisioning model where application scalability is the customer’s responsibility. The research shows that understanding the application utilization models and a proper tuning of the scalability parameters can optimize the total cost and mitigate the impact of the overhead of acquiring resources on-demand.