Wow, how did I miss this until now? In June, some smart people gathered in Barcelona for the First Workshop on Automated Control for Datacenters and Clouds (ACDC09) and jeez it looked like it was a good time, from a glance at the program.
One of the cooler papers is “Automatic exploration of datacenter performance regimes” in which the smart folks over at the RAD Lab at UCB tackle the idea of:
- Gathering up real usage metrics in production
- Taking that data to feed a resource allocation (“auto-scaling”) controller
The bits about coming up with an exploration policy is where the juicy stuff comes in, building in safety factors driven by external SLAs. You should read the whole thing to see how thoughtful their method was, which includes taking into account effects such as cold ramping, which you almost never see accounted for in simulated situations. Rock on, RAD Lab: this is the stuff that brings the academia smarts to the real world. Kudos.
FYI: I’m not just saying the paper is cool because they cite my book as a resource in it. 🙂