Load Balancing Evaluation Tools for a Private Cloud: A Comparative Study

Cloud computing turns out to be an emerging technology that revolutionized the world of IT infrastructure. However, since the number of users is increasing daily, the demand for cloud services is increasing too. Thus, congestion occurs on the servers that provide services in the cloud. To avoid congestion, we used load balancer tools such as HAProxy and Nginx to intercept the requests of users and distribute them evenly to the servers. Jmeter is used to measure the performance metrics of least connection algorithm in terms of CPU utilization, response time, and concurrency level. Results showed high performance of HAProxy compared to Nginx in terms of response time and treating requests. Furthermore, we examined the characteristic of availability of the load balancer through deploying redundant load balancers, and we studied the effect of the failure of the load balancer on the quality of service of the end users. Keepalived is used to ensure a smooth transition between the two load balancers. According to the concurrency level, results proved that the number of unsuccessful requests during the failure of the master load balancer is proportionally minuscule compared to the total number of requests sent in a normal situation.

Scaling Virtualized Smartphone Images in the Cloud

Üks selle Bakalaureuse töö eesmärkidest oli Android-x86 nutitelefoni platvormi juurutamine pilvekeskkonda ja välja selgitamine, kas valitud instance on piisav virtualiseeritud nutitelefoni platvormi juurutamiseks ning kui palju koormust see talub. Töös kasutati Amazoni instance'i M1 Small, mis oli piisav, et juurutada Androidi virtualiseeritud platvormi, kuid jäi kesisemaks kui mobiiltelefon, millel teste läbi viidi. M1 Medium instance'i tüüp oli sobivam ja näitas paremaid tulemusi võrreldes telefoniga. Teostati koormusteste selleks vastava tööriistaga Tsung, et näha, kui palju üheaegseid kasutajaid instance talub. Testi läbiviimiseks paigaldasime Dalviku instance'ile Tomcat serveri. Pärast teste ühe eksemplariga, juurutasime külge Elastic Load Balancing ja automaatse skaleerimise Amazon Auto Scaling tööriista. Esimene neist jaotas koormust instance'ide vahel. Automaatse skaleerimise tööriista kasutasime, et rakendada horisontaalset skaleerimist meie Android-x86 instance'le. Kui CPU tõusis üle 60% kauemaks kui üks minut, siis tehti eelmisele identne instance ja koormust saadeti edaspidi sinna. Seda protseduuri vajadusel korrati maksimum kümne instance'ini. Meie teostusel olid tagasilöögid, sest Elastic Load Balancer aegus 60 sekundi pärast ning me ei saanud kõikide välja saadetud päringutele vastuseid. Serverisse saadetud faili kirjutamine ja kompileerimine olid kulukad tegevused ja seega ei lõppenud kõik 60 sekundi jooksul. Me ei saanud koos Load Balancer'iga läbiviidud testidest piisavalt andmeid, et teha järeldusi, kas virtualiseeritud nutitelefoni platvorm Android on hästi või halvasti skaleeruv.In this thesis we deployed a smartphone image in an Amazon EC2 instance and ran stress tests on them to know how much users can one instance bear and how scalable it is. We tested how much time would a method run in a physical Android device and in a cloud instance. We deployed CyanogenMod and Dalvik for a single instance. We used Tsung for stress testing. For those tests we also made a Tomcat server on Dalvik instance that would take the incoming file, the file would be compiled with java and its class file would be wrapped into dex, a Dalvik executable file, that is later executed with Dalvik. Three instances made a Tsung cluster that sent load to a Dalvik Virtual Machine instance. For scaling we used Amazon Auto Scaling tool and Elastic Load Balancer that divided incoming load between the instances

Evaluating load balancing policies for performance and energy-efficiency

Nowadays, more and more increasingly hard computations are performed in challenging fields like weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration, and cryptanalysis. Many of such computations can be implemented using a computer cluster with a large number of servers. Incoming computation requests are then, via a so-called load balancing policy, distributed over the servers to ensure optimal performance. Additionally, being able to switch-off some servers during low period of workload, gives potential to reduced energy consumption. Therefore, load balancing forms, albeit indirectly, a trade-off between performance and energy consumption. In this paper, we introduce a syntax for load-balancing policies to dynamically select a server for each request based on relevant criteria, including the number of jobs queued in servers, power states of servers, and transition delays between power states of servers. To evaluate many policies, we implement two load balancers in: (i) iDSL, a language and tool-chain for evaluating service-oriented systems, and (ii) a simulation framework in AnyLogic. Both implementations are successfully validated by comparison of the results.Comment: In Proceedings QAPL'16, arXiv:1610.0769