To improve customer experience, datacenter operators offer support for
simplifying application and resource management. For example, running workloads
of workflows on behalf of customers is desirable, but requires increasingly
more sophisticated autoscaling policies, that is, policies that dynamically
provision resources for the customer. Although selecting and tuning autoscaling
policies is a challenging task for datacenter operators, so far relatively few
studies investigate the performance of autoscaling for workloads of workflows.
Complementing previous knowledge, in this work we propose the first
comprehensive performance study in the field. Using trace-based simulation, we
compare state-of-the-art autoscaling policies across multiple application
domains, workload arrival patterns (e.g., burstiness), and system utilization
levels. We further investigate the interplay between autoscaling and regular
allocation policies, and the complexity cost of autoscaling. Our quantitative
study focuses not only on traditional performance metrics and on
state-of-the-art elasticity metrics, but also on time- and memory-related
autoscaling-complexity metrics. Our main results give strong and quantitative
evidence about previously unreported operational behavior, for example, that
autoscaling policies perform differently across application domains and by how
much they differ.Comment: Technical Report for the CCGrid 2018 submission "A Trace-Based
Performance Study of Autoscaling Workloads of Workflows in Datacenters