Automatic Rescaling and Tuning of Big Data Applications on Container-Based Virtual Environments

Programa Oficial de Doutoramento en Investigación en Tecnoloxías da Información. 524V01[Resumo] As aplicacións Big Data actuais evolucionaron dun xeito significativo, dende fluxos de traballo baseados en procesamento por lotes ata outros máis complexos que poden requirir múltiples etapas de procesamento usando diferentes tecnoloxías, e mesmo executándose en tempo real. Doutra banda, para despregar estas aplicacións, os clusters ‘commodity’ foron substituídos nalgúns casos por paradigmas máis flexibles como o Cloud, ou mesmo por outros emerxentes como a computación ‘serverless’, precisando ambos paradigmas de tecnoloxías de virtualización. Esta Tese propón dúas contornas que proporcionan modos alternativos de realizar unha análise en profundidade e unha mellor xestión dos recursos de aplicacións Big Data despregadas en contornas virtuais baseadas en contedores software. Por unha banda, a contorna BDWatchdog permite realizar unha análise de gran fino e en tempo real en termos do uso dos recursos do sistema e do perfilado do código. Doutra banda, descríbese unha contorna para o reescalado dinámico e en tempo real dos recursos segundo un conxunto de políticas configurables. A primeira política proposta céntrase no reescalado automático dos recursos dos contedores segundo o uso real que as aplicacións fan dos mesmos, proporcionando así unha contorna ‘serverless’. Ademais, preséntase unha política alternativa centrada na xestión enerxética que permite implementar os conceptos de limitación e presuposto de potencia, que poden aplicarse a contedores, aplicacións ou mesmo usuarios. En xeral, as contornas propostas nesta Tese tratan de poñer de relevo o potencial de aplicar novos xeitos de analizar e axustar os recursos das aplicacións Big Data despregadas en clusters de contedores, mesmo en tempo real. Os casos de uso presentados son exemplos diso, demostrando que as aplicacións Big Data poden adaptarse a novas tecnoloxías ou paradigmas sen teren que cambiar as súas características máis intrínsecas.[Resumen] Las aplicaciones Big Data actuales han evolucionado de forma significativa, desde flujos de trabajo basados en procesamiento por lotes hasta otros más complejos que pueden requerir múltiples etapas de procesamiento usando distintas tecnologías, e incluso ejecutándose en tiempo real. Por otra parte, para desplegar estas aplicaciones, los clusters ‘commodity’ se han reemplazado en algunos casos por paradigmas más flexibles como el Cloud, o incluso por otros emergentes como la computación ‘serverless’, requiriendo ambos paradigmas de tecnologías de virtualización. Esta Tesis propone dos entornos que proporcionan formas alternativas de realizar un análisis en profundidad y una mejor gestión de los recursos de aplicaciones Big Data desplegadas en entornos virtuales basados en contenedores software. Por un lado, el entorno BDWatchdog permite realizar un análisis de grano fino y en tiempo real en lo que respecta a la monitorización de los recursos del sistema y al perfilado del código. Por otro lado, se describe un entorno para el reescalado dinámico y en tiempo real de los recursos de acuerdo a un conjunto de políticas configurables. La primera política propuesta se centra en el reescalado automático de los recursos de los contenedores de acuerdo al uso real que las aplicaciones hacen de los mismos, proporcionando así un entorno ‘serverless’. Además, se presenta una política alternativa centrada en la gestión energética que permite implementar los conceptos de limitación y presupuesto de potencia, pudiendo aplicarse a contenedores, aplicaciones o incluso usuarios. En general, los entornos propuestos en esta Tesis tratan de resaltar el potencial de aplicar nuevas formas de analizar y ajustar los recursos de las aplicaciones Big Data desplegadas en clusters de contenedores, incluso en tiempo real. Los casos de uso que se han presentado son ejemplos de esto, demostrando que las aplicaciones Big Data pueden adaptarse a nuevas tecnologías o paradigmas sin tener que cambiar su características más intrínsecas.[Abstract] Current Big Data applications have significantly evolved from its origins, moving from mostly batch workloads to more complex ones that may involve many processing stages using different technologies or even working in real time. Moreover, to deploy these applications, commodity clusters have been in some cases replaced in favor of newer and more flexible paradigms such as the Cloud or even emerging ones such as serverless computing, usually involving virtualization techniques. This Thesis proposes two frameworks that provide alternative ways to perform indepth analysis and improved resource management for Big Data applications deployed on virtual environments based on software containers. On the one hand, the BDWatchdog framework is capable of performing real-time, fine-grain analysis in terms of system resource monitoring and code profiling. On the other hand, a framework for the dynamic and real-time scaling of resources according to several tuning policies is described. The first proposed policy revolves around the automatic scaling of the containers’ resources according to the real usage of the applications, thus providing a serverless environment. Furthermore, an alternative policy focused on energy management is presented in a scenario where power capping and budgeting functionalities are implemented for containers, applications or even users. Overall, the frameworks proposed in this Thesis aim to showcase how novel ways of analyzing and tuning the resources given to Big Data applications in container clusters are possible, even in real time. The supported use cases that were presented are examples of this, and show how Big Data applications can be adapted to newer technologies or paradigms without having to lose their distinctive characteristics

BDWatchdog: real-time monitoring and profiling of Big Data applications and frameworks

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Future Generation Computer Systems. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.12.068[Abstract] Current Big Data applications are characterized by a heavy use of system resources (e.g., CPU, disk) generally distributed across a cluster. To effectively improve their performance there is a critical need for an accurate analysis of both Big Data workloads and frameworks. This means to fully understand how the system resources are being used in order to identify potential bottlenecks, from resource to code bottlenecks. This paper presents BDWatchdog, a novel framework that allows real-time and scalable analysis of Big Data applications by combining time series for resource monitorization and flame graphs for code profiling, focusing on the processes that make up the workload rather than the underlying instances on which they are executed. This shift from the traditional system-based monitorization to a process-based analysis is interesting for new paradigms such as software containers or serverless computing, where the focus is put on applications and not on instances. BDWatchdog has been evaluated on a Big Data cloud-based service deployed at the CESGA supercomputing center. The experimental results show that a process-based analysis allows for a more effective visualization and overall improves the understanding of Big Data workloads. BDWatchdog is publicly available at http://bdwatchdog.dec.udc.es.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad; TIN2016-75845-PMinsiterio de Educación; FPU15/0338

Real-time resource scaling platform for Big Data workloads on serverless environments

Versión final aceptada de: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.11.037This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/ 4.0/. This version of the article: Enes, J., Expósito, R. R., & Touriño, J. (2020). 'Real-time resource scaling platform for Big Data workloads on serverless environments', has been accepted for publication in.: Future Generation Computer Systems, 105, 361–379. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.11.037.The serverless execution paradigm is becoming an increasingly popular option when workloads are to be deployed in an abstracted way, more specifically, without specifying any infrastructure requirements. Currently, such workloads are typically comprised of small programs or even a series of single functions used as event triggers or to process a data stream. Other applications that may also fit on a serverless scenario are stateless services that may need to seamlessly scale in terms of resources, such as a web server. Although several commercial serverless services are available (e.g., Amazon Lambda), their use cases are mostly limited to the execution of functions or scripts that can be adapted to predefined templates or specifications. However, current research efforts point out that it is interesting for the serverless paradigm to evolve from single functions and support more flexible infrastructure units such as operating-system-level virtualization in the form of containers. In this paper we present a novel platform to automatically scale container resources in real time, while they are running, and without any need for reboots. This platform is evaluated using Big Data workloads, both batch and streaming, as representative examples of applications that could be initially regarded as unsuitable for the serverless paradigm considering the currently available services. The results show how our serverless platform can improve the CPU utilization by up to 77% with an execution time overhead of only 6%, while remaining scalable when using a 32-container cluster.This work was supported by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness of Spain and FEDER funds of the European Union (project TIN2016-75845-P, AEI/FEDER/EU), the FPU Program of the Ministry of Education, Spain (grant FPU15/03381) and by Xunta de Galicia, Spain (Centro Singular de Investigación de Galicia accreditation 2016–2019, ref. ED431G/01). We also gratefully acknowledge CESGA for providing access to the Big Data infrastructure, and also sincerely thank Dr. Javier López Cacheiro for his technical support to perform some of the experiments. Other experiments presented in this paper were carried out using the Grid’5000 testbed, supported by a scientific interest group hosted by Inria and including CNRS, RENATER and several universities as well as other organizations.Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/0

BDEv 3.0: energy efficiency and microarchitectural characterization of Big Data processing frameworks

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Future Generation Computer Systems. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.030[Abstract] As the size of Big Data workloads keeps increasing, the evaluation of distributed frameworks becomes a crucial task in order to identify potential performance bottlenecks that may delay the processing of large datasets. While most of the existing works generally focus only on execution time and resource utilization, analyzing other important metrics is key to fully understanding the behavior of these frameworks. For example, microarchitecture-level events can bring meaningful insights to characterize the interaction between frameworks and hardware. Moreover, energy consumption is also gaining increasing attention as systems scale to thousands of cores. This work discusses the current state of the art in evaluating distributed processing frameworks, while extending our Big Data Evaluator tool (BDEv) to extract energy efficiency and microarchitecture-level metrics from the execution of representative Big Data workloads. An experimental evaluation using BDEv demonstrates its usefulness to bring meaningful information from popular frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark and Flink.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad; TIN2016-75845-PMinisterio de Educación; FPU14/02805Ministerio de Educación; FPU15/0338

Big Data-Oriented PaaS Architecture with Disk-as-a-Resource Capability and Container-Based Virtualization

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Grid Computing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-018-9460-4[Abstract] With the increasing adoption of Big Data technologies as basic tools for the ongoing Digital Transformation, there is a high demand for data-intensive applications. In order to efficiently execute such applications, it is vital that cloud providers change the way hardware infrastructure resources are managed to improve their performance. However, the increasing use of virtualization technologies to achieve an efficient usage of infrastructure resources continuously widens the gap between applications and the underlying hardware, thus decreasing resource efficiency for the end user. Moreover, this scenario is especially troublesome for Big Data applications, as storage resources are one of the most heavily virtualized, thus imposing a significant overhead for large-scale data processing. This paper proposes a novel PaaS architecture specifically oriented for Big Data where the scheduler offers disks as resources alongside the more common CPU and memory resources, looking forward to provide a better storage solution for the user. Furthermore, virtualization overheads are reduced to the bare minimum by replacing heavy hypervisor-based technologies with operating-system-level virtualization based on light software containers. This architecture has been deployed on a Big Data infrastructure at the CESGA supercomputing center, used as a testbed to compare its performance with OpenStack, a popular private cloud platform. Results have shown significant performance improvements, reducing the execution time of representative Big Data workloads by up to 4.5×.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad; TIN2016-75845-P, AEI/FEDER, EUMinisterio de Educación; FPU15/0338

Power Budgeting of Big Data Applications in Container-based Clusters

[Abstract] Energy consumption is currently highly regarded on computing systems for many reasons, such as improving the environmental impact and reducing operational costs considering the rising price of energy. Previous works have analysed how to improve energy efficiency from the entire infrastructure down to individual computing instances (e.g., virtual machines). However, the research is more scarce when it comes to controlling energy consumption, specially in real time and at the software level. This paper presents a platform that manages a power budget to cap the energy consumed from users to applications and down to individual instances. Using containers as virtualization technology, the energy limitation is implemented thanks to the platform's ability to monitor container energy consumption and dynamically adjust its CPU resources via vertical scaling as required. Representative Big Data applications have been deployed on the platform to prove the feasibility of this approach for energy control, showing that it is possible to distribute and enforce a power budget among users and applications.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España; TIN2016-75845-PMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación de España; PID2019-104184RB-I00Consolidation Program of Competitive Reference Groups; ED431C 2017/04Xunta de Galicia e fondos FEDER; ED431G 2019/0

A pipeline architecture for feature-based unsupervised clustering using multivariate time series from HPC jobs

[Abstract]: Time series are key across industrial and research areas for their ability to model behaviour across time, making them ideal for a wide range of use cases such as event monitoring, trend prediction or anomaly detection. This is even more so due to the increasing monitoring capabilities in many areas, with the subsequent massive data generation. But it is also interesting to consider the potential of time series for Machine Learning processing, often fused with Big Data, to search for useful information and solve real-world problems. However, time series can be studied individually, representing a single entity or variable to be analysed, or in a grouped fashion, to study and represent a more complex entity or scenario. In this latter case we are dealing with multivariate time series, which usually imply different approaches when dealt with. In this paper, we present a pipeline architecture to process and cluster multiple groups of multivariate time series. To implement this, we apply a multi-process solution composed by a feature-based extraction stage, followed by a dimension reduction, and finally, several clustering algorithms. The pipeline is also highly configurable in terms of the stage techniques to be used, allowing to perform a search with several combinations for the most promising results. The pipeline has been experimentally applied to batches of HPC jobs from different users of a supercomputer, with the multivariate time series coming from the monitoring of several node resource metrics. The results show how it is possible to apply this multi-process information fusion to create different meaningful clusters from the batches, using only the time series, without any labelling information, thus being an unsupervised scenario. Optionally, the pipeline also supports an outlier detection stage to find and separate jobs that are radically different when compared to others on a dataset. These outliers can be removed for a better clustering, and later reviewed looking for anomalies, or if numerous, fed back to the pipeline to identify possible groupings. The results also include some outliers found in the experiments, as well as scenarios where they are clustered, or ignored and not removed at all. In addition, by leveraging Big Data technologies like Spark, the pipeline is proven to be scalable by working with up to hundreds of jobs and thousands of time series.Xunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/01Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2021/30This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (PID2019-104184RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), and by Xunta de Galicia, Spain and FEDER funds of the European Union (Centro de Investigación de Galicia accreditation 2019–2022, ref. ED431G 2019/01; Consolidation Program of Competitive Reference Groups, ref. ED431C 2021/30). Funding for open access charge: Universidade da Coruña/CISUG

BDWatchdogFaaS: A Tool for Monitoring and Analysis of Functions-as-a-Service in Cloud Environment

Cursos e Congresos , C-155BDWatchdog is a framework to assist in the in-depth and real-time analysis of the execution of Big Data frameworks and applications. BDWatchdog was originally developed to monitor Hadoop ecosystems deployed on serverless containers, in order to detect bottlenecks and spot certain patterns that frameworks or applications may have. In thisworkwe shift the focus to monitoring serverless functions in the public cloud, by proposing an extension of BDWatchdog which captures, transforms and analyzes logs from both AWS Cloudwatch and Azure Application Insights, which store the logs from AWS Lambda and Azure Functions (respectively), the FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) solutions of the two main public cloud providers, AWS and Azure. The extension, called BDWatchdogFaaS, builds and stores a common model to both providers, allowing to consult, analyze and monitor function logs from AWS and Azure indistinctly. The transformation of logs into the common model is done by a FaaS of the corresponding provider, which in near real-time ingests, processes and sends the data to a common storage. In addition, the data is forwarded to a Power BI dashboard so that the serverless functions can be monitored easilyThis work was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (ref. PDC2021- 121309-I00/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and by the European Union “NextGenerationEU/ PRTR”. CITIC is funded by the Xunta de Galicia through the collaboration agreement between the Conseller´ıa de Cultura, Educaci´on, Formaci´on Profesional e Universidades and the Galician universities for the reinforcement of the research centres of the Galician University System (CIGUS